The Smiley Smile Message Board

Hi all,
I understand that in the early seventies Carl and Stephen Desper were working with some of the Smile sessions for a possible release of the album by Warner Brothers.  Is that correct?  If so, did they reach the point of assembling a possible list of tracks that could be worked on?  Was that list documented?  Just interested.   ;D

After Surf's Up (song) had worked so well they were encouraged to see if something similar could be done with the remaining Smile tapes, but found it to be a complete mess and Brian wasn't exactly willing to help them piece together. However, VDP was around at that time and even recorded vocals for ADITLOT so I wonder to which extent Jack and Carl consulted with him.

What is ADITLOT?

A day in the life of a tree…

Cheers John, saved me from going and looking through the collection! :-D

Has it been documented anywhere about Carl's role in finishing "Cabin Essence" and "Surf's Up" from the SMiLE sessions back in the late '60's?

Dennis helped out with the backing vocals to CE and Stephen Desper added his expertise engineering.

Without them we would never have heard these masterpieces as near to their completed form and I can't thank them enough for this even though it may have been against Brian's wishes.

Hm, "a complete mess"?  That's a shame.  I'm sure I came across a little snippet of information a few years ago that gave a list of the tracks that Carl and Stephen Desper were considering for a possible future release but perhaps I'm mistaken.  Actually, I'm sure "Do You Like Worms" was on that list...   I know that Brian wasn't exactly enamoured with the idea that these tracks were even being considered, let alone worked on.  According to sources he jumped in his car and disappeared while "Surf's Up" was being worked on, but didn't he make the contribution of "A children's song, have you listened as they play..."?  Anyway, I honestly feel that (I am taking a chance here!) Brian never got round to finishing "Smile" simply because the task of piecing it all together seemed impossible to him, (Hell, I know making edits to a few tracks can be a frigthening thing!) and also, I believe he might've been just a tad lazy with regard to that aformentioned task.  Think about it, he was in a complete creative streak long before "Pet Sounds".  His musical output is EXTRAORDINARY for such a short space of time!  He moves into "Smile" territory, still feeling that great impetus but then it starts to dwindle.  It happens to most people who are creative, doesn't it?  Either you just get down to the task and FINISH or you move on to something else.  I know I've done that with music I've composed.  I once junked an entire album's worth of material.  The very material that I considered "wonderful" when I first started working on it!  Anyway, it's certainly not a slur on Brian's character, and I have strayed somewhat from the original post topic but these are the ramblings of someone who has had a few to drink this evening, so I do apologize!  That list still intrigues me though...   ::)

This is also my interpretation except I think the record shows Brian always knew what he was doing and what it was for when he got to the studio. He was not obsessively or speculatively recording and hoping he would find a place for or a way to put it together.  My interpretation is he was possibly trying to impress some people and went out of what was satisfying to his Muse and as he lost interest in the people he lost interest in make something to impress them. Either that or, as he has said, they did a lot of stuff that seemed great to him when high but not when he was sober. Either way his head was creating stuff his heart was not that into imo.

The editing technique that went into making GV so excited Brian that we wanted to make a whole double album song-suite using that technique -- and found out that it couldn't be done. It was just too complicated for the studio tools that they had at their disposal in those days. His failure had nothing to do with drugs or mental instability or Mike Love.

Carl couldn't put it together either. We had to wait until computers.

No doubt his technique of modular recording was something else!  It's what makes listening to the Smile sessions as exciting as they are.  I also don't doubt that he had a clear idea of "what went where" but by golly, whether it had anything to do with the equipment available at the time or not, I'm still convinced he decided to drop it out of lack of any real interest, and not because of drugs or cousin Mike, as a previous member of this board posted.  I agree with that poster.  So much music, so much pressure, then the Beatles, blah blah blah...  Carl did a damn good job with "Cabin Essence" but didn't Brian have a few acetates made during the recording of "Smile"?  Surely Carl had heard those acetates and worked from them in order to construct a finished product?  These are just airy-fairy thoughts from someone who continues to obsess over that great time in music history when anything seemed possible and Brian was the man leading the entire pack. 

It could be done.  You can hear it on We're Only in it for the Money, done around the same time.

I think Cam is on the right path.  In the end, Brian chose to emphasize the minimalism he toyed with for his solo version of "Surf's Up" and the first version of "Vegetables," and gave us Smiley Smile, which is essentially Party! meets Pet Sounds, satisfying both aspects of his muse.  While Brian has a serious side, I think the humorous side is dominant, and something like Smiley Smile was probably way more of an inevitability than Smile.  Part of that inevitability is Smile stemming from so much outside influence, as Cam said.

I think Brian's lack of interest/direction left the building when his collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, left.

Best explanation I've read. But, it was preceded by Pet Sounds, which was only lukewarmly promoted. Smile must have sent the record company off the deep end.  My sense is that they only had "so much room" (or direction of resources) for "high profile experimental music" and they went with the Fab Four.  It is amazing how they selected the 11 tracks for the LP.  

The green (however lovely) artwork, didn't make it "pop" among the hundreds of LP's competing for the $3.00 (US) price tag, in the record stores. The second "green" album in a row.  The original storefront with red (to which the eye is always drawn) might have fared better.  Maybe as "Smile Vol.1" to be worked on in a sequence, interspersed with such stuff as Wild Honey, etc.  Smile was a huge undertaking, but it turned out fine, in the end by evolving as a much-anticipated work. And, with the originals' vocals. But, I would never consider this a "failure" on any level. It was just too big and likely ahead of its time.

Fresh eyes (Darian!) and computer assistance, did seem to make the job more manageable, from all I've read.  Carl had the weight of the world on his young shoulders at that time, with his CO draft status.  And, clearly they had great committed sound people.

I may be interpreting your words wrong, but it is a misconception that Brian just had to choose how to put all those pieces together and then do it. Look at the way Good Vibrations was created: Brian recording and rerecording and rererecording and producing lots of ultimately discarded versions.

Unlike Pet Sounds, where he recorded each song more or less in one day with great results, he was unable to do that during the SMiLE era. During SMiLE he was very undecisive about the things he had recorded, and his new producing technique of recording sections instead of whole songs made everything more complicated.

It would have been possible to edit a whole album out of those shorter pieces, but you would need to exactly know what you want. During the sessions Brian seemed to know what he wanted, but he seems to have been very insecure about the results of those sessions.

The April Vega-Tables show the most how Brian's shape had deteriorated. 2 weeks of recording for a track lightyears from the Pet Sounds sophistication and not even producing a finished version? He was NOT in great shape!




Party! meets SMiLE rather, but it seems to me to like Brian wanted to recapture some of that Party! easiness.

I think it was kind of vice versa, although once the lyrics were written VDP's job was already done and he didn't have anymore influence over what Brian ultimately did or thought than the Boys did. "History" has tried to make the Boys out as a problem when it didn't really exist. The overlooked situation is reflected between the collaborators, Brian falling out of sync with Van Dyke. Brian eventually feeling the words and music were too arty/sophisticated and overly elaborate and Van Dyke feeling the music wasn't sophisticated enough and resenting Brian's dominance. Imo, SMiLE didn't happen because Brian and Brian alone ultimately didn't feel it in his muse.

I also think the inadequate technology angle is a red herring. Brian bragged about knowing what their physical limitations were and how to take them to the limit of possibility. Brian planned out and notated the what and where of ever bit of what he did as he did it and he did not plan something he could not physically produce. Computers and software weren't needed for butt cut editing together 3 to 6 pieces of tape that you had noted as you recorded them the places they would have in the track assembly. Imo.

Thanks, Smile is what I meant to write, not Pet Sounds.

I think the Zappa analogy is interesting, because from what I understand, FZ was extremely focused and a workaholic, not to mention mostly an abstainer.  He might have been the ONLY guy in the pop scene in the late '60s who could have had the skills to edit something like that together.

Zappa had an analytical mind, with a classical composer's control of large-scale structure. Brian was more of a "feel", intuitive guy. I don't think he had the whole of 'Smile' in his head before he began recording. He had an overall, general idea of what he wanted, and trusted he could get there in the end through the process of trial-and-error recording, just like he had so successfully with GV.

George RR Martin the writer has this theory of there being 2 kinds of writers -- architects and gardeners. Architects have the whole thing blueprinted before they nail up the 1st board. The gardeners dig a hole and drop in a seed. As the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know before hand how many branches the plant will have and what shape it will take, they find out as it grows.

Brian was a gardener without a blueprint, and he got lost in the details. That's my take on it, anyway.

So we totally agree about the feel of Smiley Smile. :)

Totally.  Add in a lot of dope smoking, etc. and it gets tough impossible to figure out if one great arrangement of the pieces sounds better than the next.  THAT is why Smile fell apart.

Put in another way, had Brian recorded complete songs only instead of sections, he would not have had to come up with lots of transition sections as in the case of H&V. But then still, he rerecorded Wonderful as a whole song despite having a perfect track and vocals, with inferior results. Who knows how often he would have had to record both movements of Surf's Up until he would have come up with a result that satisfied him! It would have taken him about half a year for each song...

I think that is probably true for Carl because he didn't know the plan for the songs.

Brian did know the plan for the songs and when he changed the plan he knew the new plan for the song. He prided himself and bragged in the press how he thought about the songs and the albums before he went into the studio. And Britz and the players say he came to the studio knowing what he wanted. And sure enough he documents what each section is for each song and where they fit in the song as he recorded them and as he made changes he documented what song the new section was for where it belonged in the new version of the song. Brian was actually very focused and deliberate and organized even in his changes.

I would point out that the songs he spent the most time on and made the most changes to are songs that he actually finished. The songs he didn't finish only had a few parts that were well identified from a single session or few requiring just a few edit. I'm just saying, to me it is a fiction that Brian couldn't finish SMiLE because he didn't know how to or technology or disorganization or drugs or mental illness especially since he did finish many of the most complicated songs. To me that leaves what Brian said all along, he finished it the way he did or didn't finish because he didn't like the SMiLE version.

The argument that Brian was pushing studio limits too far, and that the technology to pull off Smile wasn't available yet and wouldn't be until computers is, frankly, absurd. I think ever since Boyd and Linett said this in interviews after the release of the box set this argument seems to have picked up a lot of steam and is now being repeated. I don't necessarily think that they believe in that reason, rather, i suspect that explanation, as with almost anything in the world of the Beach Boys, involves politics, and the intent of presenting the BB story in either the most marketable or least thorny way.    

As Cam mentioned above, it's really just a matter of a few butt edits per song. And if the composer/arranger/producer knows what he wants and has a detailed plan mapped out, there's nothing that radically different from the technology of completing a Smile song than, say, editing in the intro of You Still Believe in Me, or the outro of I'm Waiting for the Day.

I think anyone who buys this argument must not be acquainted with the whole of Musique concrète, or what the creators of early popular electronic tape music and library music were doing at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in London and at the Dutch Philips Research Lab close to a decade before Smile. Those methods involved hundreds of tape edits per 1-4 minute song, and this was before multi-tracking (not even 2 track), so they had to sync up several tape machines, sometimes up to eight of them (!), on top of the insane amount of editing that was required. It's a process that would sometimes take weeks to complete just one song. Listen to John Baker's stuff for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop where he would record (or, as we now call it, "sample") one sound (ex: tapping on a glass bottle) and then create an entire pop song where, by using variable tape speed, every note in the song (the notes of the melodies, harmony, and rhythm loop) was a small piece of cut tape, each note sticky-taped to the next in the sequence. This isn't just sequencing the structure of a song (verse/chorus/bridge, etc.)...it's sequencing the actual musical phrases that make up every part of a song. It's Smile on the micro level. Just look at pictures of the Philips Lab from the late '50s and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the early '60s and look at the sheer amount of tape hanging everywhere. Read about these methods and listen to this music (which, by the way, was popular music, not academic) and then tell me that the technology wasn't available to Brian to complete Smile in 1966/67.

There's also, as it's been mentioned, Frank Zappa, who in 1967 did something very similar (and maybe more complex?) with Lumpy Gravy to what Brian was attempting with Smile. Actually, one doesn't even have to look to outside examples because the Good Vibrations 45 happened half a year earlier. That alone is enough evidence to refute the bogus "technology" argument, which is just another Smile red herring. The story is often told that with Smile Brian was trying to do a whole album of what he had accomplished with GV but because GV took 6 months, Smile wasn't feasible. But it didn't have to take 6 months to complete GV because of technological limitations. Brian was just endlessly chasing a muse, which would take him even further down the rabbit hole with the Smile album. In '66/'67 Brian's limitations were he himself.

Here is the song "Syncopation" from Tom Dissevelt's 1962 EP, Electronic Movements. This track was recorded in 1958 and has hundreds of edits in it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMqljWWM0jM

Listen to pretty much any early '60s stuff by John Baker, who was a wizard at this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh4awCSSwCs

And Delia Derbyshire, who was the one who realized Ron Grainer's score to the Doctor Who theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM8uBGANASc
It's been said that while working on the Doctor Who theme, Delia would unwind the entire edited comp tape down the corridors of the BBC to see where the edits were, measuring the splices and taking notes, when she had to recut to make readjustments.

This stuff is all, from an editing and sequence standpoint, i.e. the "technology" of it, infinitely more complex than Smile.

BWPS shows that just about every Smile song was finished, bar a couple of master vocals on a few songs. Some people say Brian didn't know how to finish Smile but I'd say the opposite - the guy was practically done and realised that the finished article just wasn't that much to his liking anymore.

BWPS worked with everything which had been created before Brian abandoned SMiLE, without having to face any formal limitations or internal struggles. I absolutely agree that it wasn't the technology that prevented Brian from finishing SMiLE, although it was more difficult without the aid of computers to keep track of all those tapes. But I stick with the opinion that it wasn't only pure dislike of the results of the recordings that prevented Brian from finishing SMiLE but the deterioration of his mental state. This deterioration is well documented. That he sounds secure during the sessions is no contradiction, as the studio was where he felt most at home. I mean, if Brian was able to pull off something complex like Pet Sounds, I see no reason why he should not succeed with the SMiLE material if his mind was still sound.

I join with this consenus and add the following as a garnish:  In making Smile, Brian deliberately created each module such that any one piece could conceivably be pasted with any other piece and the results could be somewhat coherent.  The various edits of H&V and Vegetables show the possibilities of this.  Plus - and I am suprised no BB insider has commented on this - Brian refused to ask for any help from anyone, or to delegate, during this process by which he was supposedly "overwhelmed".  Maybe due to his breakdown state he was stymied, but it wasn't due to the Smile project.  He could have given some dub reels to people and told them to cut them together so he could hear what sequences he liked.  They would do the scut work and he could approve it and take the credit. He didn't; he wouldn't.    Hanging on to his Ego?  Maybe.  Also, maybe, his seemingly offhand remark in 2004's "Beautiful Dreamer" was the honest truth after all: he didn't finish assembling Smile because "I got tired of it."

Granted, the advances in digital editing made this process a lot less arduous in 2003-04 and after, where you could try things out and do new assemblies in a few mouse moves as opposed to a few minutes to get out the razor and splicing tape for each edit.

PS:  Besides Frank Zappa and the musique concrete guys, other musicians using tape editing as a compositional tool were the German band Can (whose stuff sounded like the future in 1969 and still does today), and Miles Davis, with his producer Teo Macero (from "In A Silent Way" through "Bitches Brew" and the "On The Corner" sessions).

Ok, but that brings us round again to the thread topic. If the only reason Brian was unable to finish SMiLE was because of mental illness -- or, as folks elsewhere in the thread opine, he just grew tired of the project, or he outgrew the material -- why then were Carl and Stephen Desper unable to complete it?

Surely mental illness is no explanation for their failure?

Well, as we all know, Smile was Brian's album. He knew what he wanted and what do with all the pieces.

Steve and Carl probably couldn't make heads or tails of most of the recordings or what to do with them.

I think the second paragraph is a pretty good refutation of the thesis in the first, if we make an apples-to-apples comparison of the technology available and the effort required.

It would have been a very time intensive, laborious process to do this over the course of an entire album, and the practical aspect nobody is addressing is the logistical challenge of just finding what you want on which tape.  It's not just the amount of time it takes to edit things together and try them out and see if they work.  That's bad enough.  It's locating which part is on which tape, scrolling to the exact spot, then getting the blade out, resplicing, respooling the tape, put it back, find the next tape, etc.  Without having a precise idea of what you're looking for where (and even if you did), the idea of mixing and matching various spots to see where they fit, as opposed to having a preconceived notion of it, over the course of entire album's length of work, would overwhelm all but the best brains.

It's easy to forget in this digital world where you can just put a sound file up on a screen and see exactly where you were at with it, with analog tape you are flying blind other than what's on the tape box.  It doesn't seem like that would make a big difference, but you're talking about a process of about 15 to 20 minutes just to find the exact spot you're looking for on the tape FOR EACH EDIT...whereas now, it takes seconds.

Not to say it is isn't theoretically possible to do it this way but I think it would drive nearly anyone, no matter what their state of mental health is, nearly insane.

Not to say you aren't right that Brian wandered down too many alleys and lost his muse...but had he not made so many starts and made it so impossible to finish, he might well not have lost it.  I know I would have.

Coming back to the topic, it shouldn't be forgotten that Carl and Stephen Desper did so much to ensure the preservation of the Smile tapes, whether or not it was to assemble Smile for a 1972 release under the terms of The Beach Boys' Warners contract. For that alone we should be grateful to them, as without the tapes no bootlegs, no BWPS, no TSS.

Finding all of the bits may have been hard for Carl and Stephen, someone should ask him.

For Brian it would have been business as usual. Wouldn't it have been more like for 10 songs there would be two or three tapes all labeled as for what song and on the tapebox and called out on each take and in Brian's head each section would be labeled as to its place in the song. It would be a few pieces of tape and a few edits for at least ten songs. Then even with GV, H&V, and Vt it would still be for any any iteration of the song a few tapes for a particular song again all labeled as to a song and 5 to 8 sections of  tapes labeled and called out as to song and place with a few edits. Once he looks through the tapes for the OMP tape for one section of OMP. I think the mistake is to think that every section of every song was on the desk for each version of each of the songs. The revisions and substitutions are also clearly marked and identified as to song and place in song. I think we have invented a problem for Brian that he actually didn't have.

Again I'll just say, these supposedly difficult to manage/finish songs were the ones which were actually finished and using the available technology and his then-current state of mind and method for working.

No, in their case the reason is that neither of them were Brian Wilson. Again, it is a misconception to think that all the pieces were there and all they had to do was piece it together in the "right" order. I don't believe that, when Brian abandoned SMiLE, he thought he had recorded all needed parts or even composed it completely.

I guess Carl and Desper could have done an album using the SMiLE fragments, but it was wise by them not to do that behind Brian's back. Essentially that's what Brian and Van Dyke Parks did with BWPS, taking the amassed fragments and designing a completed album out of what was there. But only those two had the authority to do that.

I'm curious, who has worked this way? Has anyone recorded a dozen or so songs to tape, songs with 4 or 5 sections, 2 or 3 tapeboxes per song, all sections idenitified on the tape and/or tape box as to place in assembly, edited together the way Brian and Britz would have. How many man hours per song would it take on average? One or two hours? I have no idea, I've only edited silent movie film this way.

I shudder at the thought.

How could Brian be so careless with the tapes of his best work, he really didn't care it those songs never saw the light of day. What was he thinking.

He was thinking it wasn't his best work.

If i did so, i didn’t mean to suggest that finishing Smile wouldn’t have been a time consuming, overwhelming process -- i did, as you pointed out, stress how laborious that kind of heavy editing work can get -- and i have no doubt that the Smile tapes have looked like a complete mess to people who have gone through them over the decades, but i don’t think anything in my post refutes itself because what i’m saying is that that early electronic popular music that i cited was significantly more complicated/involved in terms of editing than what Brian was doing with Smile, even though it was to be (nearly) an entire album’s worth of modular recordings. So, while it would’ve taken BW longer to edit together Smile than anything he had done before, my point was simply that i don’t think it’s accurate to say that it was an impossible task due to the technology not being available yet, as has been suggested more and more in recent arguments about why Smile collapsed. People use GV and its 6 month recording time as a yardstick to determine how long it would’ve taken to do a whole album like that, but there wasn’t anything inherent to the technology of the day that made it take that long to finish the song. That was down to Brian and his idiosyncratic methods at that time. He kept rethinking what he wanted to do, is all. Remember, this is the guy who would cancel sessions at the last minute because of bad vibes. The guy who would go back and rerecord already completed sections, often with inferior results. If one wants to use GV to argue the impossibility of a whole album of songs like that, citing Bran's perfectionism and the level of artistry he was attempting to achieve, fine, but the inadequate technology argument doesn't hold water.  

In order to make manageable the process you mention of locating specific spots on different tape reels, it requires detailed note taking and a highly organized, often personal, system. Again, i will point to the work of those at the Philips Research Lab and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (by the way, i should point out that these were mostly analytic minds, science and math people) --if you look at the pictures of their notes and labeling system, you can see how well mapped out, if idiosyncratic, their ideas were. You have to know what you want, and be organized enough to keep all the parts accounted for (and not doubt yourself!) Still, it takes time of course, just like so many things did before computers. That said, i actually think, based on all the evidence, that Brian was fairly organized and knew (at one point) where he was going with the project, but, the thing is, having a highly organized system doesn’t count for anything if you are constantly second-guessing yourself, which clearly caused him to keep going back and changing things around, complicating the whole process along the way. I think this is where you and i agree. To give an analogy for the point i was trying to make in my first post: imagine that you have all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in front of you, and you already know exactly where they go, you just have to actually put them down on the table in order. But as you’re getting closer to piecing the puzzle together, you keep flipping the table over, thus having to start over, and each time you become less certain of yourself. And then you have people say that you couldn’t finish the puzzle because tables weren’t flat enough back then when you were working on your puzzle.  

I also think people make the editing aspect of Smile out to be more complicated than it really was. Take H&V, a song that i think everyone can agree was one of the more, if not the most, involved pieces of Smile. The February ’67 cantina version only has 7 edits. The completed Smiley 45 single has 6 edits. The revisionist, everything but the kitchen sink version on TSS has 10. Then there’s H&V Part 2, as heard on TSS, which has 7 or 8. GV had 8 edits. The TSS version of Vega-Tables has 7. DYLW has 6. The rest of the songs break down like this:  


Our Prayer: a few edits only because they were learning it in sections and recording the sections as they learned them, just as they did with "And Your Dream Comes True"
Cabin Essence: 4
Look: I’m not sure about this one -- wasn’t the backing track recorded in one shot? The master used for TSS has edits from different takes though. Don’t know if Brian would’ve just used one take or edited different takes together. I forget if there’s a vintage Brian mix of Look. Either way, since all the parts were recorded in one session with the same musicians, this would've been more like the kind of editing on a Pet Sounds song.
CIFOTM: Don’t recall the sequence of Brian’s acetate mix, but i imagine the final sequence would not have had more than 4 or 5 edits.
Wind Chimes original arrangement: I thought this one was recorded as one piece straight through, but the TSS sessionography says the master is edited together.  
Wind Chimes TSS version: 3?
Wind Chimes GV box sequence: 2
Surf’s Up: 2?
Fire: 2 (if you want to count the H&V intro as part of it), if not, 1
Dada: 2 (if you want to count the water chant as part of it), if not, 1
Holidays: 1
IWBA: 1
OMP/YAMS: 1
Wonderful: 0
Barnyard: 0 (although, of course, it it was to be part of H&V, then...)
He Gives Speeches: 0
You’re Welcome: 0


So, as you can see, the most amount of edits any of these songs had contemporaneously was 8. I understand that it's not just about how many edits a final song has, that the amount of parts that are considered as contenders for inclusion in the final mix is more relevant to the issue, in the way that a movie that has tons of outtakes is going to take longer to edit, but this brings us back to the idea that if Brian had known what he wanted and stuck to it, the editing of the album becomes infinitely more manageable. Sure, this was to be an album much more reliant on editing than the average pop album of that time, but i think Smile is only this crazy, elusive jigsaw puzzle to us because none of us are the creator of the work, thus we have no idea what the (ever changing) master plan was. I think if Brian hadn’t doubted himself as much as he did, gone back and changed things around as much as he did, constantly made revisions to the structure of some of these songs, added and dropped sections to songs, taken sections from one song to instead use for another song, spent time rerecording sections and adding to the stack of tape boxes, Smile wouldn’t have been this monumental undertaking. That it was had more to do with stuff like Brian’s mental/emotional state, or his personality, or his feelings about the project, or the fact that he was composing in a new, experimental way for him that was very open-ended, than it did with the technology that he was supposedly pushing past its limits.

And we can’t forget that the completed Smiley Smile album has its fair share of edits too. Not quite as much as Smile, but then consider how quickly they arranged, recorded, mixed, edited, and put out that album. Wild Honey is also pretty modular. So, the technology wasn’t available at the time to complete Smile yet Brian Wilson completed two modular albums within a half a year after abandoning Smile?  :brow