I thought that Brian wasn't allowed to use the original SMiLE cover for BWPS but I don't remember the details.

The story that was told on one or another of the fora 20 years ago is that, Brian's graphic artist in residence Mark London initially worked with Frank on some pre-concert posters and other promo materials  But at some point, as the story goes, Brian's "people" asked Frank how much $ he wanted for the rights to all of his Smile-related art (i.e., Smile shop, booklet illustrations, '90s updates).  Frank started asking questions about how his art would be used, merchandising, derivative uses, anticipated quantities, etc., and the response was along the lines of "Never mind all that. How much $ do you want?!"  And Frank's response again was, "How can I say when I have no idea what you're planning on your end?"   And again, Brian's "people" came back with another response like,  "What part of 'never mind all that' did you not understand?  HOW MUCH DO YOU WANT?!"   And then Frank said, "Fine," and proffered a number.  To which Brian's "people" said the number was ridiculous and told Frank to pound sand.

I've never particularly cared for Mark London's take on Smile, but clearly David Leaf disagrees and used it for this new book.  But the silver liniing is, as noted above by Don Malcolm, Frank's artwork was gloriously used and celebrated in the 2011 Smile Sessions releases. And of course will also be available for Capitol  for any future Smile packages.   If Frank's work had been used by solo Brian in 2004, that likely would not have been the case, so all's well that ends well in that regard.

I'm surprised, Dan, that David Leaf professes ignorance of your Inside Pop cataloguing.  I remember when you posted that info decades ago.
I finally got my library copy of DL's book.  It's okay, but is anyone else of the opinion that Frank Holmes gets short-shrift in this tome?  Yeah, Frank is mentioned here and there, but how do you do a book like this and not give the Smile shop artwork and booklet pride of place?  I mean, it's ICONIC.   For a long time, the cover and the booklet were the most "real" thing about Smile.

On a positive note, I think the color photo of Brian at the piano in the sandbox (near p. 100) is possibly the only one I've ever seen of the legendary sand box.

See, THIS is what I was talking about when I said on the other thread: "I kinda feel like we're long overdue for some kind of game-changing Smile tidbit..."

Of course the hope is that some genuinely lost piece of Smile ( e.g., full or partial versions of CIFOTM or IIGS or H&V or whatever) was captured by Oppenheim and his crew.

Many thanks for posting a review, Dan. Sounds like a decent read but probably not something I'm going to decide to own and put on the shelf next to my vintage first-edition of Dom Priore's LLVsS.  My public library has a copy of the book on order, and I've put a "hold" on it when it arrives.    AS a 30+ year Smile aficionado, I kinda feel like we're long overdue some kind of game-changing Smile tidbit... like when the "Humble Harv" demo surfaced way back when.   But, alas, perhaps the well is truly dry at this point, and there will never again be any truly "new" Smile anything.... but still I dream of it...

I, for one, am glad to see Al taking Brian's guys back on the road, and i'll happily attend one of their shows if I'm reasonably near one.

The Pet Sounds Band is a little hokey but it's more accurate than if they had gone with some variant of Surf/Summer/Beach.  Something arcane like the Radiant Radish Revival or the Dumb Angel Orchestra or the Bellagio Road Crew might have been more fun for the hardcore fan but would likely have baffled the wider audience. 

Toward the end of the 3rd segment, Carnie makes some comments along the lines of having been kept away from Brian over the last 20 years... and now finally being able to spend a lot of time with him.

The obvious implication is that Melinda wasn't welcoming toward her. And that's very sad.  No one owes us as fans any sort of explanation as to what was going on and why, but it's very strange. Clearly there were many periods over the past two decades when Brian and Carnie were in fairly regular contact and other periods when contact was strained. There often two sides to every story. Was Melinda just being a brat? Or if she was squeezing out Carnie and Wendy, did she have legit reason for doing so?

I also like Carnie a lot. She may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I think she's similar to Brian in many ways. She's herself, says what she wants, and doesn't care what anyone else thinks. She seems like a kind, loving person. I don't care about her salty language. She's not hurting anyone--just cursing a bit!

I agree.  It's a minor miracle that Carnie is so normal and down-to-earth.  Her salty vocabulary may not be everyone's cup of tea, but she's pretty obviously a good person.  She kicked her own substance abuse demons a quarter century ago. She's a family person with really normal husband and daughters.   Despite all the turmoil of her youth, she clearly adores her dad, and has a great love for her uncles, Grandma Audree etc.  She's not a person of anger or grudges. God bless her.

Whoa... despite some interesting tidbits and anecdotes, David Marks does possibly the saddest, most disturbing, train-wreck Beach Boys interview I've ever heard.
Sad that it sounds like he's spending his waning days and nights drunk, high and alone.  Tragic, really.

Thirty plus years ago, I read an interview with Milton Love in which he commented that Al Jardine was the only member of the Beach Boys who had really survived being a member of the Beach Boys.

"Brian Wilson called that last day too. Brian didn’t make the call but his assistant put him on the phone and he kept saying, 'Andy! This is Brian! This is Brian Wilson! I love you Andy!'

I'm not crying. You're crying.

Can't remember where I read it, but a long time ago, some interlocutor said to Andy, "You and Brian did a lot of demos that remain unreleased."  Andy corrected the person, saying something along the lines of "Brian and I did a lot of *masters* that remain unreleased."

Things allegedly began to seriously sour between Mike and Al during the recording of the 1992 "Summer in Paradise" album, with Mike reportedly complaining of Al's “severe attitude problem.”  

Things finally boiled over in the 1997 period when Carl was gravely ill, and Mike and Al bitterly disagreed over Al's idea of doing a "symphonic tour" wherein they would perform with music with various symphonic orchestras

From the horse's mouth...
Goldmine, July 28, 2000.

So what prompted your decision to stop touring with Love's version of the Beach Boys?

We had a symphony tour lined up for the United States. Lots of interested symphonies that could give our music a breadth and depth that we didn't have before and give them a little extra business they needed. A lot of symphonies were going bankrupt. For instance the San Diego Symphony was in a desperate state, and we were going to do our rehearsal concert there in San Diego. They would get one and we would get one. That kind of deal where they get one for their coffers and we'd get a chance to rehearse and get it underway. And then go to the Hollywood Bowl, get that wonderful place sold out and take it from there all over the country. Carry our charts with us and give them to all the different symphonies.

What happened?

Love steadfastly refused to do it. He insisted that Brian be there, I remember that remark which is not all wrong. I don't disagree with that. It would be great if Brian could be everywhere, but we all have to be realistic. He's not going to be predictable that way. He's got only so much energy for that kind of work. He's not built for it.

Brian never liked to tour.

I think Brian was designing our songs back in the day so we wouldn't have to be dependent on him. Anyway, I suggested that he conduct the concert at the Hollywood Bowl. I thought it would be neat if he could come out and take some credit for all that great work. Anyway, that wasn't to be. Mike refused to do it. I think it would've been a great tribute to Carl. It would have been built around the music, not the messenger. It wouldn't have been built around any one of us.

After Carl passed away, you were still in the band and then decided to leave the Love touring lineup sometime after that.

Right. It became one of those moments. Love continued to tour. He didn't stop touring. He just didn't want to tour in that modality. That wasn't his idea of "fun, fun, fun." [laughs] So he continued to work with his band, The California Beach Band, and he would go out and do dates and have surrogate singers do Carl's parts. I thought that was tasteless. While at the same time not going out with the Beach Boys because of Carl's passing so there's some kind of contradiction in that, in my opinion. In fact, my son Matthew at the time was still in that employ, which I did not disagree with because I don't want him to not be able to earn a living. But at some point it got uncomfortable.

So at what point did you pack it in with that lineup?

When Mike refused to tour with the Beach Boys. He just refused to tour with us in any fashion. I can't go into detail with you right now, [but] it got reorganized where Love took the band with an exclusive license and I didn't. And Bruce decided to go with the guy who sang all the hits. Matthew had to make some decisions of his own. We decided to form this entity - Beach Boys, Family And Friends, which I felt would mmore accurately define the harmonies and the vitality of what was missing in the waning years of the band.

https://troun.tripod.com/al.html

Fascinating stuff!! Many thanks for collecting all this.

One other comment...   To many of us on this board, it's probably unsurprising to see Brian on Hawthorne High's academic honor roll in 1960.   But it is indicative of the falseness of the narrative pushed by some observers that Brian was some kind of "idiot savant"--- a man with great musical ability but not much else in the way of intellectual capacity.   I mean, just a few weeks ago, there were comments even among some alleged "fans" insinuating that Brian wasn't smart enough to understand Van Dyke Parks' Smile lyrics.  The fact is that Brian was a very intelligent guy.  The man's raw intelligence was perhaps masked by his eccentricities and, later, mental illness, but we're talking about a very bright guy.   He wasn't born into an academically-oriented family like VDP nor was he educated at expensive private schools, but frankly it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Brian's IQ was actually higher than Van Dyke's.

Awww, very cool.  And Musso & Franks is such a Hollywood classic. 
 It's fun to imagine mid-'60s Brian stopping in there for a steak and baked potato or an enormous plate of spaghetti and meatballs before heading to a late-evening session down the street at Western Recorders. 

Returning to the music, I thiing there was yet another reason SMiLE was not only not completed in 1967, but was probably UNCOMPLETABLE: it had become a FRACTAL, where single parts of the whole had become as complex as the whole! And you can't complete a fractal, you can only keep zooming into it!
That was the result of the "modular approach" carried to the extreme: the modules had modules, which had modules...
To complete SMiLE in 2004, it was necessary to take a "snapshot" of a specific iteration of the fractal structure. So, BWPS is legitimately "SMiLE the snapshot", but not the same as "SMiLE the fractal".

Not sure I made sense...

I get your point, but I suspect that there's a fair amount of "hindsight bias" baked into that hypothesis.  In his '67-'68 conversations with Paul Williams, David Anderle said that Brian had cut enough instrumental tracks for Smile to make 2 or 3 albums.  That may or may not have been true, but consider the December 1966 12-track list submitted to Capitol (which though I know Brian disavowed decades later but other knowledgeable observers insist wouldn't have been accepted by Capitol unless the producer, Brian, had at least verbally signed off on it). We can look at that track list and point to more-or-less completed tracks for nearly everything except the elusive 2nd movement of Surf's Up and The Elements.  If Brian had forced the issue in the Spring of 1967 and corralled the group into completing vocals on those 12 tracks, we would have *a* Smile album, perhaps not the theoretical masterpiece album-to-end-all-albums Smile album that uniquely exists in each of our minds now, but to me it doesn't take a huge leap to think that *a* Smile album could have completed and released from the extant tracks if perhaps 40% more vocal work had been added in the spring.

I suspect that the 20th century's mass popularity of owning music on physical media gave rise to a sort of mentality that each musical work there was some "definitive version."     In other words, for example, the song "Be My Baby" and The Ronettes' 1963 record "Be My Baby" are one and the same, and every other rendition of the song is not "the" song but something other than that (a "cover" or a "live version" or an "alternate take" etc.).   In the world of music, I suspect this mentality was something of an innovation.  Was there some "definitive version" of Beethoven's 5th symphony or Mozart's "Magic Flute" or a Christmas carol like God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen?  Not really. For symphonies, every performance had its own unique elements of arrangement and instrumentation and voices.

Thus, we come at Smile from the perspective of wanting to point at something and say, "This is *the* Smile album."  But I think we must resign ourselves that such a paradigm simply can never apply to this thing Smile.  Brian Wilson Presents Smile is *a* Smile album, just as Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops' 1940 rendition of Pachelbel's Canon in D is *a* Pachelbel Canon in D -- a great one, perhaps-- but not some archetypical "definitive version."

For me one of the great ironies of "The Beach Boys' Smile" is that one of the most finished segments, the Grand Coolie Dam section of Cabin Essence, was allegedly highly controversial within the group due to the lyrics.  And yet in that one section, I hear everything that "The Beach Boys' Smile"  could have been and should have been-- weird, wild, stunning, haunting, brilliant.  If Brian had completed and released a Smile album as fully produced and arranged as that one section, there's no doubt in my mind it would have been the album that he promised that would have been as much of an improvment over Pet Sounds as that was over Summer Days Summer Nights.

For me, the verification of Marilyn's claim is provided by Chuck Negron's memories from the same period.
When Chuck remembers Mike, Carl and Al reducing Brian to tears in the control booth during the Darlin/Time to Get Alone sessions and browbeating him into stopping his Redwood collaboration, that sounds exactly like the emotional beat-downs that Marilyn remembers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thebeachboys/comments/12y53b2/excerpts_from_chuck_negrons_three_dog_night/#lightbox

We all have our own opinions and theories.  I personally believe that when Brian predicted that Smile would be as much of an improvement over Pet Sounds as that album was over Summer Days Summer Nights, he wasn't saying something crazy.  Ditto when Dennis said that Smile was so good that it'd make Pet Sounds stink.At the same time, I can listen to Pet Sounds and say that it's the greatest album ever released.  All of that can be true because, as a collection of songs, as collection of instrumental tracks, as a collection of lyrics... Smile is a work of staggering genius.  I mean, just look at the 12 tracks submitted for the album jacket in Dec. '66 and tell me that a collection of fully produced versions of those 12 songs didn't have the potential to blow away every album that came before and after.  And yet it was not completed and released as it could have been and should have been.

What went wrong?  I think that Abe Somer's Jan. '67 lawsuit against Capitol is a seriously underrated factor.  The litigation removed the pressure on Brian to finish the album in that Jan-Feb period.  By the time that Brian resumed work in April, the momentum was lost and VDP was gone.  Also, Brian was in period of rapidly going through "phases" (exercise, meditation, health food, religion, astrology, and many more).  When Brian and Marilyn moved to the  Bellagio house with its home studio, I suspect that there was a great deal of excitement about that new approach and that Brian was eager to do something there.  So, rather than finish "Smile: the studio album" the old way, Brian came up with the idea using the home-studio to remake the songs.  Some of the more orchestral pieces like Cabinessence simply didn't lend themselves to that approach, so Brian and Mike hatched a handful of new tracks like Gettin Hungry, Little Pad, etc.

"It just hurts to look at him!"

what an awful thing for that news lady to say about Brian, jeez.

Yikes, what a tacky, tasteless comment for her to make about any human being.  

I googled her, and the newscaster, Ann Martin, apparently lost her job due to budget cuts in 2008 and went into retirement at that point.  Good riddance.

Clearly Brian has entered a new phase in his life, but it's so great to see him surrounded by adoring family and friends.  For a man who, for various reasons, spent several extended periods of his life in relative isolation, it's inspirisng to consider how beginning in the mid-1990s he was able to get so many aspects of life back on a good path.

The irrepressible, inestimable Carol Kaye weighs in....

“Staged and Phony”: A Wrecking Crew Alum Shares Her Real Thoughts About New Beach Boys Documentary
https://americansongwriter.com/staged-and-phony-a-wrecking-crew-alum-shares-her-real-thoughts-about-new-beach-boys-documentary/

In light of many of the issues raised in the discussion here about the Sea of Tunes controversies, due to their prominence in the documentary, I revisited the topic as discussed in Mike Love's "Good Vibrations" autobiography.  After that review, I think it's important to realize that the Sea of Tunes issues and ML's continuing resentment and regressive views of the Smile era are NOT unrelated phenomena.  The nexus between the two is David Anderle.   In his book, ML alleges that Anderle was high-school buddies Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. And all of them were friends and business associates with Abe Somer, who Love says that Anderle brought in as the Beach Boys' lawyer.  Love sees Somer as a diabolical character who, with an assist from Anderle, basically ripped the BBs off to enrich his buddies and other clients, Alpert and Moss.  (In fairness, ML makes a valid point that there's a basic breach of ethics to be representing both sides of a transaction without disclosing his conflict of interest).  At the same time, in ML's mind at least, there's no daylight between Anderle and the Smile era.  They're one and the same.... all one giant fiasco that resulted in Michael Edward Love being ripped off.

Everybody agrees that ML penned the words to California Girls. Did he really write everything he got his name added to in the '94 lawsuit?  I'm skeptical.

Tony Asher has said that ML's addition to the "Wouldn't It Be Nice" credits is a joke.  Adding "good night, sleep tight" (hardly an original rhyme) to the outro during the vocal sessions shouldn't have merited songwriting credit.    George and Ringo both commented many times that they added various lines to Beatles songs credited solely to  Lennon-McCartney. Did they sue?

I can understand, I guess, how the "Sea of Tunes" issues are interesting to scholars of the band, but I really don't think they're as interesting to casual viewers of Disney documentaries as Mike Love and Frank Marshall apparently do.  As I mentioned earlier in the thread, even I, a hardcore fan, have never lost a minute of sleep over the fact that Brian, Mike and their various wives and ex-wives aren't even richer than they are because Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss allegedly ate their lunch, courtesy of Murry's antics. 

When I saw Marilyn in the doc incredulously lamenting that Murry unloaded SoT to AlMo in 1969 for $700,000, chump change, right?  But the erstwhile corporate finance student in me is thinking.... "Hmmm, $700k in 1969, invested in the S&P 500... average annual return since then of 10.5%... in 2024: $169 million... not terrible.

If you can stand the use of Artificial Intelligence, I'd refer you to the Dae Lims SMiLE. Particularly "Do You Like Worms", which makes a really brilliant use of that Brian sing-songy. I love the Dae Lims work because imho it really gives an idea of what a SMiLE 1967 could have been...

That's a pretty nifty mix. Thanks for the heads up!

Not to mention DYLW and CITFOTM !

Those 2 have always bothered me a bit, as the tracking sessions seem every bit as inventive as Brian's typical efforts of the Pet Sounds/Smile era, yet the void of missing melodies is quite painful.  Brian's tracking session sing-songy "once upon the Sandwich Islands" hints at something quite different than what was done on BWPS, and Child? Who the heck knows.  VDP's 2004 "easy, my child" bits are okay but not on par with his vintage work.  The 1966 Hit Parader reference to CIFOTM as a "cowboy song" that Dennis (or was it Brian) gave a piano demo is an enigma.  Do you do a piano demo of just the chorus one of the *least* finished songs, or was there more to it that was forgotten/lost?  Was it supposed to be a Dennis song, and thus his salvaging of parts of the track for Little Bird? Again, who knows?     CIFOTM is very much "the one that got away."

  I wouldn't have disagreed if they'd put Pet Sounds first, but I'm okay with putting Smile on top.  Even in its incomplete state, it's pretty obviously one of the strongest collections of songs ever assembled....

Our Prayer
Good Vibrations
H&V
Surf's Up
Wonderful
Wind Chimes
Vega-Tables
Cabin Essense
Mrs O'Leary's Cow

Seriously, just on the basis of the above, how many albums can top that?

The other bits such as Barnyard, Great Shape, TOMP/Sunshine, DaDa, Holidays, Look have a lot of brilliance too.