The Smiley Smile Message Board

We all know a lot about Brian's inspirations for his vocal arrangements, and the sources of a lot of the lyrics, and Carl's guitar sound, etc.
We know that he was a big fan of Phil Spector, but to my ears Phil Spector's arrangements sound muddy, unmelodic and imprecise next to Brian's.
Do we know what sort of antecedents Brian Wilson listened to that led to his complex and precise arrangements, using a variety of traditional and untraditional instruments to make representative, analogical sounds (sounds like 'childhood' or 'fire' or 'jewelry'). He had a lot of jazz inflections that can be heard before Pet Sounds; does anyone know if he listened to much instrumental jazz? Did he listen to avant garde experimental music? Did this actually just show up in his head, or was it a building on influences?

Brian's arrangements were very different from Spector's. Phil went, famously, for a Wall of Sound, while Brian's sound was translucent -- a complex and varied array of sometimes unusual instrumentation yes, but you can hear space around each instrument, and Brian makes clear the relationships between instruments.

In general, Brian goes for clarity, Phil goes for energy and power.

I believe it was a building of influences starting with Rhapsody in Blue first heard as a child.

Nicely put, clack.

That makes sense. Can you think of any other producers/arrangers in the 60s who were going in this direction that Brian may have personally or just through listening that he may have been bouncing ideas off of?

I think the verse of "Heroes and Villains" is heavily inspired by "River Deep – Mountain High"

What about Jan Berry?  I'm sure Brian was influenced in some way by his production methods.

Nothing sounds like Smile in 1966 or 2016. BW was operating on an otherworldly level.

Brian was at the session for RDMH, I believe.

I don't hear that in the arrangement, but I absolutely do in the rhythm and chords.

Amen to that brother! One piece of SMiLE music that always fascinates me is the fade to Heroes and Villains/My Only Sunshine. Especially the melodies played by the plucked string instruments. I always wonder what Brian's prime influence was for this segment, it sounds like absolutely nothing anyone had ever heard of before or since 1966.

Really? I think the cellos are a pretty obvious point of comparison.

I'm just trying to compare in my head. I'll try to actually listen when I get home tonight.

Agreed… and I'd love to see a lengthy playlist of what Murry Wilson listened to when Brian was a little kid as I'm sure that must have made a big mark on those young impressionable ears. Or ear. I also wonder how many of the songs on Brian's Gershwin album might have been on that playlist and whether there might have been some unacknowledged but deliberate tip of the hat in that direction? For all the abuse that came down from on high, the influences in terms of musical taste, from father to son, must have been indelibly strong in a house so filled with music.

The bass line to RDMH is a lot faster; it sounds like if you took the cellos from H&V and sped them up. 
I love RDMH. I don't get why it wasn't a hit, although maybe the public by that point had moved on from the Spector sound.

I hear it...not quite the same but close

I'm not aware of Brian being into straight instrumental jazz (but then Rhapsody in Blue uses jazz) but I think his production for PS and Smile was a mix of Spector and instrumental exotica ("tiki") music like Martin Denny and Les Baxter plus the more avant garde Esquivel.  Definitely hear that influence on the PS instrumentals and Smile stuff like Worms, Wind Chimes, Holidays, I Wanna Be Around/Friday Night (Workshop), Cabinessence.

See, here's some stuff that I don't know anything about. Could you give me some albums/tracks to look for?

Martin Denny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2dQ3WbcF44
Les Baxter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTwwnEggw24
Esquivel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVdPjAKWkao

While I'm not sure if there's much evidence that Brian was a fan of this music, it was a huge genre in the late 50's and 60's and I agree that its influence can be heard in his arrangements, specifically on Pet Sounds.

Nelson Riddle

 Murry probably had the tiki exotica albums and Esquivel - so Brian would have been familiar with this music.  I vaguely remember an interview or article that referenced what Murry listened to and that it included this stuff, but I could be misremembering -- AGD would know!!

Heroes and Villains sounds far more like Save The Last Dance For Me by Ike and Tina Turner than RDMH. In fact it's , well extremely close.
The Indian noises from Worms are a lift from Running Bear by Johnny Preston.
Many of the arrangement ideas (not executions) are quite Charles Ives. Ives wrote many pieces about Americana and you can "see" the things the music was about. Two examples being Halloween (see Mrs O'Leary's Cow) and The Hook, The Gong and The Ladder. Central Park In The Dark is another classic visual piece of his.
If you cross Ives with Carl Stalling's cartoon music and mixed in with The Four Freshman and Spector on acid you get pretty close to Smile.
I don't know how familiar Brian was with Ives work but I can well imagine Van Dyke was at least aware of him....that whole approach of music actually sounding like what it's about is very Ives - the breezy marimba on Wind Chimes, the cello run and fuzz bass representing the train and the plink plink of the pickaxes on the railroad, jewellry percussion, babies wah wah on Child IFOTM etc..
I cannot help thinking that Van Dyke had some influence on this as it did not really occur again after Smile with notable exceptions including Diamond Head. I wish Van Dyke had had some decent input into the box set. I imagine he could still respond with interesting information if asked the right questions.

I surmise that Disney cartoons and Looney Tunes influenced the arrangements for Smile. I have no evidence, however.

Thanks so much. And Bicycle Rider. This is really informative and gives me some interesting leads for stuff to listen to. Love it!

This is brilliant!!

+1

The influence of Disney's mentioned in the Charles Granata PS book, quoting Hal Lifson, though its not clear what their evidence is either.

Some excellent insights in this thread for sure. You'd be surprised how many of the songs on Pet Sounds have a foundation i-iv-v chord progression and/or i-iv progression, in major and minor keys. For example, the verses in Wouldn't It Be Nice are F-Bb-C7 with the bridge F#m-Bm. The complexity of these songs (and others on Pet Sounds) comes from the bass notes, which many other artists such as Paul McCartney and Elton John have attested to and have been influenced by it in their own music.

There are some songs that take these basic foundations even further, centring on two chords. For example, the famous French Horn introduction to God Only Knows is A-E and the main chords to Here Today in the verse is Bm-A and Chorus D-A. I believe that Brian took this basic two chord foundation, incorporating complex melody arrangements, even further with SMiLE. I know that Tobias Bernard wrote a great article on the music of SMiLE espousing the two-chord theory on the old Smile Shop site.

A friend of mine told me that the two-chord song structure on many songs on SMiLE was influenced by 1920s American jazz which would be understandable in light of the Americana theme of the album.

One thing I know for sure is that the music of SMiLE is anything but basic, Brian took these basic two-chords movements to a whole other level. (For example, the Gm7/D-Dm7/G verse chords on Surf's Up or the F7-Bb on the verse and Gm-C7 'Bicylcle Rider' section of Do You Like Worms?)

One thing I was thinking about, just this week, is that Pet Sounds has mostly traditional introductions on each song (excepting That's Not Me, Don't Talk, Here Today and I Just Wasn't Made For These Times) whereas the SMiLE-era songs differed by beginning with the verse mainly (Heroes and Villains, Cabinessence, Wonderful, Surf's Up, Vegetables, Wind Chimes and Good Vibrations).

His inspiration for arrangements??

Acid and Pot probably.

I'm so glad I posted the question, because I'm learning so much. I grew up hearing a lot of jazz and always thought there was some heavy jazz influence beyond the vocal arrangements on both of those albums (or whatever we should call Smile) both in the inherent structure of the music and in the arrangement/instrumentation. I also hear it in some earlier songs like Little Girl I Once Knew and Let Him Run Wild.

I also hear the movie influence - I was driving with my daughter yesterday while she was watching "The Red Balloon" on her iPad. Hearing the score while not watching, I noticed the similarity in instrumentation. The musical structure is not so similar, but the instrumentation was in ways. Living in LA and working with musicians who worked on film scores, I can see where the influence might have seeped in.

And, I've been listening to some Ives since reading ash's post, and I'm definitely hearing that link.
I love this.

I hear it in the melody. Compare the descending line of "RDMH" beginning at the word "girl" (..."girl I had a rag doll") with the initial descending line of melody of "H&V". Both begin on the subdominant----a most unusual move----only "H&V" cuts out the initial ascent to that note...         

I hear it in the melody as well. And I get what I Do It All for You is saying about the arrangement. In the specifics - what instrument and where it's played - there may be a lot of similarity between Spector and B. Wilson, but the final sound is so different to me - B. Wilson's has so much clarity and specificity, and Spector's is so muddy - that I find it hard to call them similar.

Calling brief attention to a reply of mine to Fishmonk (a very interesting SSer who unaccountably changed his name to "Dunderhead" and has been "lost and gone and unknown" in these parts for nearly a year, from a thread about "With Me Tonight", dating back to August 2012, that deals with Spector, the "wall," and Brian's response to it as a composer/arranger. First, Fishmonk:

With Smile Brian had to branch out from the orchestral formula used by Spector, he needed to expand his palette in order for the color of each song's production would match the lyrical content. This lead Brian to really break out of the 20 musician formula that he had learned from Spector, he started using instruments that Spector never thought to use, and he started getting much more expressive and controlled playing out of his musicians. This afforded him with substantially greater control over the actual orchestral flavor of a recording, but it came at a price. Because he had become more efficient, he was able to use fewer instruments, say 4 instead of 20. But those 16 players were the thing that allowed the 'wall of sound' to hit its critical mass.

Essentially Brian had lost the volume and presence that he had gotten using the more Spector-ish formula. So he was trapped in a vicious circle, more formulaic orchestration, or less wall of sound.

Then my response:

Spector's musical sources were clustered around Brill Building pop, particularly the strain that would morph into blue-eyed soul. Wedding that to "the wall" was saturation, overkill, but the voices/vocal arrangements were if anything more formulaic than the "wall" itself. (Only Tina Turner was able to "defeat" the wall, being a truly primal soul singer.)

Brian already had his own "wall"--which was the band's vocal blend. It, too, was formulaic at first--but Brian kept experimenting with it, giving it a wider range of tonal color, a more encompassing range of timbres, and the flexibility to be both powerful and intricate simultaneously.

Once Brian was in the thrall of Spector, he really had two "walls", and he began exploiting that with a vengeance around the time of Today. '65 is when he moved past Spector's wall into a realm of synthesis all his own. As you say, that became more sophisticated and the instrumentation became much more individually expressive with Pet Sounds. And I think it's exactly right that a portion of the Smile material began to clash with that approach, even with the successful arrangement innovations and mind-blowing sounds in the backing tracks of "Cabinessence" and "Surf's Up" (first movement). It's actually "Surf's Up" that points to the dilemma, which is that "chamber music" is not compatible with symphonies (pocket or otherwise).

Trying to synthesize "Heroes & Villains" into a chamber symphony seems to have been the killing blow for Smile in '67. The competing impulses between chamber music and symphony were all resolved in the direction of a capella intimacy for Smiley Smile. Once he had that Baldwin organ, he could take a stand and make entirely different genres of Beach Boy music built around it--and the remaining "wall" he still had at his disposal.--the voices in the band.  And that's what he did, with great success but slowly decreasing frequency, over the next four years, until he hit a third wall--the wall of depression, auditory hallucination, and drug abuse.

All this is probably more abstract than what's been posted here thus far, but hopefully it has some contextual value...

That's a great exchange and really clarifies some of the challenges on Smile - trying to synthesize two very complex and different forms. Thanks.
And what Fishmonk says about Spector v B. Wilson is exactly along the lines of my thoughts. But I don't feel like losing the 'wall' is a problem. I prefer the "more expressive and controlled playing" of Pet Sounds and Smile by far.

See, this is the stuff I wanna see more of in this forum!

Could Smile be a cross between Burt Bacharach and The Mother of Invention? :)

Maybe! I certainly see the Frank Zappa connection. Zappa's notion of "conceptual continuity" is not that far away from how Brian conceived the "modules" of Smile. 

On a more literal level, the trumpet melody at 6:25 could be a line from a Zappa composition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZJrDI6NUj0

     

This is among the most enlightening of correspondences I've seen on the board in all of my time lurking here. It puts the post-Smile era into such an excellent frame of reference! To me, the Smiley Smile and beyond era (extending even as far as Holland) was not a regression from Pet Sounds and Smile, but rather a progression sideways into new musical adventures. This entire topic is full of great information. Thank you for starting it, Emily!

This is surely the kind of thread which is needed here. A consideration of the music, which produces some fascinating information and opinion.

Hi all,

Brain wanted to try new things. 

Agreed! Maybe it's the rose-coloured glasses thing, but it seems that threads like this were the norm just a few years back...   

The Four Freshmen were influenced by Stan Kenton.  I've never seen anything written about instrumental jazz that Brian would have listened to, but I wouldn't be surprised if he checked out some Kenton in the old days.  I'm sure he was aware of people like Pete Rugolo and Nelson Riddle from seeing their names on album covers.  I wonder if he watched Peter Gunn or M Squad, which were among the first TV series to feature jazz in the late '50s?

Brian doesn't strike me as a guy who was listening to the entire output of specific artists by the mid '60s (he was busy doing his own stuff).  If he heard something by, say, Miles Davis, he'd pick up on whatever struck his fancy; I don't see him going to Wallichs Music City and coming out with a stack of Miles Davis LPs.

George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was one of his first musical memories, and I'm sure the young Brian played every record in the house in Hawthorne at least once.

You can really hear the influence of Martin Denny's "Quiet Village" in the title track of PS, down to the triplets in the melody:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcphJelpc_Y

Raymond Scott perhaps. He was one of the early innovators of music recording and even electronic music. Much of his music employs sounds to mimic or represent different associations.  That said, some of his catalog served as a foundation for many of Stallings cartoon compositions.

For example:
New Year's Eve in a Haunted House
"New Years" party around 1:00-1:50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOVPHObQH1I