It's bedtime, but I'm going to say one last thing, a little bit of a change in topic, but I've been thinking about Smile all evening and I want to say it.

Smile was not finished, not in 1967 and not in 2004. But I believe it was close enough, that we have enough of it, to understand, conceptually, intellectually, and also in our hearts, what a finished Smile would have been, what it would have meant. Good Vibrations, Cabinessence, Wonderful, we have these songs in versions that are, for all intents and purposes, finished. The first two minutes of Surf's Up with Brian's vocal on the 1966 backing track. It is not hard to imagine a version of Surf's Up in which all three movements are produced to the level of that first section. It is not hard to imagine A Do You Like Worms finished to the level of Cabinessence, or the Fire Music brought to the level of Good Vibrations, howling, roaring, perfectly produced. I can imagine that album. Sometimes, late at night, with the lights off, sitting in silence, I can almost *hear* it.

And I believe, with all of my heart, that that album, that the album Brian Wilson came *this close* to finishing in December of 1966, would have been one of the great achievements of the human mind. That it would have stood alongside Van Eyck's Ghent Alterpiece and Michelangelo's Last Judgment and the Elgin Marbles and the Benin Bronzes, alongside Beethoven's late period and Bach's organ music and New Orleans jazz, against Einstein's theory of relativity and Tolstoy's novels. Pet Sounds is my favorite album of all time, but I'm not sure it belongs on that list, not really. Honestly, there is not a single piece of popular music recorded in the 1960s that, in my opinion, belongs on that list, that belongs among *the greatest creative acts of human civilization.* But that is what I hear in the Smile music. A bid for *that* list. That list of human invention and creative potential pushed to the absolute limit.

And so I love Smiley Smile, I really, really do. But f*** Smiley Smile. Smiley Smile is a great album. It's not Smile. Nothing is Smile, nothing can replace that incomprehensible loss, not how I see it.

Wind Chimes didn't get much bigger or smaller, besides the bombastic bridge section in the Smile version, which itself was a result of an earlier, larger production from August.

I agree with this. But I think the quote I pulled is where you maybe lost guitarfool, and me too a little. Because, sure, technically Wind Chimes might have been recorded using the same number of musicians, it might be musically at a similar level of complexity. And yet, my ears tell me that the Smiley Smile version is smaller. Or maybe, a better way to put it would be more "low key." It's low key in the way Carl is singing, it's low key in the way its mixed, it's just... Like, you're right, it didn't get smaller, not technically, not factually. But somehow, that fact, the fact that it didn't get bigger or smaller, doesn't tell the whole story. Because even though it didn't get smaller, it still *feels* smaller. It just does. You know what I mean?

And that's also where I think, at least in a certain light, or a certain iteration, the story Joshilyn and you are telling about Smiley Smile doesn't always feel quite right to some of us. And again, I don't think there's a real, significant difference here. Just a shift in emphasis, maybe. But I think there is an extent to which fans of Smiley Smile (like me!) want to position it as "just Brian's next obsession". And like, yes, that's  true. But also it represented a huge decline in ambition as a commercial record producer, and I'm not willing to concede that point... that in addition to a new set of obsessions, Brian also brought to this moment a shocking lack of ambition compared to what had come before.

Wind Chimes didn't get much bigger or smaller, besides the bombastic bridge section in the Smile version, which itself was a result of an earlier, larger production from August.

I agree with this. But I think the quote I pulled is where you maybe lost guitarfool, and me too a little. Because, sure, technically Wind Chimes might have been recorded using the same number of musicians, it might be musically at a similar level of complexity. And yet, my ears tell me that the Smiley Smile version is smaller. Or maybe, a better way to put it would be more "low key." It's low key in the way Carl is singing, it's low key in the way its mixed, it's just... Like, you're right, it didn't get smaller, not technically, not factually. But somehow, that fact, the fact that it didn't get bigger or smaller, doesn't tell the whole story. Because even though it didn't get smaller, it still *feels* smaller. It just does. You know what I mean?

This too! I have a hard time articulating myself sometimes… I’ve had a couple of strokes and since then I have a tendency to talk in circles to the point where the meaning of what I’m trying to say gets lost.
I almost started doing it again 🧐

That's got to be tough, I'm sorry about that. For what it's worth, everything you're saying in this thread makes total sense...I was just reading too fast!

I'm trying to understand how the point earlier was that Brian actually made some of the Smile songs more complex productions when he remade them for Smiley Smile, and how that would match what you're suggesting as fact that he was moving toward minimalism. If he actually loaded more instruments and parts onto these songs and made them more complex than they had been, how does that equal a move toward minimalism?

I mean, I think the larger point is just about continuity between Smile and Smiley Smile... so like, in *Smile,* minimalism is evidence of continuity with Smiley Smile...whereas in *Smiley Smiley* complexity is evidence of continuity with Smile.

But really I stand by the belief that everyone here is right with just various differences in focus and emphasis.

BJ, I actually don't think we disagree about that.  While I don't believe Smile had a fixed RIP date, I do believe that the Derek Taylor assessment came from Brian and that, by that time, he considered Smile over and done with.

At that point, he was still working on music, for some album, it just wasn't Smile anymore.  So we have something like Dada, which is not part of Smile and not part of Smiley Smile, but is part of the continuing work towards some new product, and likely recorded for some inchoate "album" that Brian had in mind that day.

Yea that makes sense. It's funny how often disagreements boil down to just...saying the same thing two different ways! (although it's also absolutely true that there are fundamental disagreements of interpretation going on this thread at various points!)

That is a good question that was never asked! I'd also add why was there absolutely no follow up, none at all, in any other music press outlet after Derek Taylor's "scrapped" comment was published? It's as if no one noticed that he basically wrote the obituary for one of the most anticipated albums of the year,  and no one even referenced addressed the comment. Very, very odd!

Interesting indeed.

And another thing worth pointing out: Derek Taylor had spent a lot of time hyping this music. Once he *believed* it was not coming out, he would arguably have had something of an incentive to say so publicly, if only to make clear that whatever Brian Wilson was now working on, it wasn't the music he'd, at least to some extent, hitched his professional reputation to!

We can agree to disagree, as we will, apparently, have to.  But I will never understand why you can't just say, "Ok, it's possible" to the idea that a guy who snapped a long string of big productions might have been exploring moving in a smaller-scale direction.  Heck, I'll go so far as to say that it's possible that Smile has an official RIP date.  Very, very unlikely, but possible.  

Well, on what I'm about to say I'm pretty sure *no one* on this thread agrees with me! But nothing in this thread has really shaken one of the old school assumptions that some of ya'll are trying to overturn: that one day, Brian said f*** it, I'm done, Smile is over, called up his publicist Derek Taylor, and told him so, that Derek Taylor published an article saying that Smile had been scrapped, and that that was true.

There's been a lot of talk about people putting too much weight on this article, but to me, personally, that argument requires a very high bar of evidence. Because a publicist is a publicist, even one as unusual as Derek Taylor, and I just simply don't see any way that that press release goes out without Brian Wilson being the source. And that once Brian Wilson has decided Smile is scrapped and told his publicist and its been published in the press...the album is scrapped. And so here, I guess, I disagree with Joshilyn...because at some point Brian Wilson woke up, had breakfast, and said, you know what, I'm done. Done enough to announce it publicly. Whatever comes next, it's going to be something different. And if that's not an RIP date I don't know what is.

I'm really not either! The only part where it falls apart for me is when the claim is made that the Smiley Smile arrangements are somehow easier to perform live, or the stronger claim that they were done for that purpose

But I don't think that's what Guitarfool was saying. If I understand him correctly (and this was like pages and pages ago at this point!), what Guitarfool was arguing was not that Smiley Smile's arrangements were designed to be easy to perform live, but rather that the criticism the Beach Boys picked up in Europe over their live performances, and their general anxiety about the recorded material getting further and further from the reality of the touring band, that those *bad feelings* pushed Brian towards a more minimalistic recording method that was, if not necessarily easy to perform live, might have nonetheless taken some of the teeth out of the band's complaints. It's a subtle, but I think important, distinction.

Yes, but...

When all of the songs on Pet Sounds are heavily orchestrated, and then half of the songs on Smile are heavily orchestrated, and then even those initially orchestrated songs are redone in a minimalistic fashion, do you see that there is, objectively, a general movement to more minimalistic recording?

No, I do not see any implications beyond Brian deciding to remake, rerecord, and change his mind on certain tracks. And perhaps after hearing the fuller arrangements he decided they didn't work for those songs as well as a more sparse sound would serve them. You say objectively as if it's fact, but ultimately that's just your opinion, isn't it?

guitarfool, I say this with all love and respect, because truly you have made really helpful and important contributions to this thread, have posted primary sources I had never seen before, and have said a ton of things I agree with! But there is a move towards a more minimalistic approach during the smile sessions compared to the Pet Sounds sessions. That *does not mean that your argument about Smiley Smile's conception is wrong!* It really doesn't, and that's why, as I've said, I'm not 100% aligned on either side here.... but like, Brian pursuing minimalistic production methods more often in 1967 than he had done in 1966 is not an opinion, it is a fact. What that fact *means* is an opinion. Whether that fact matters for how we view the transition between Smile and Smiley Smile is an opinion, but that Brian's methods were changing over time, I mean, it's on the tapes, it's happening.

(Although in your defense, I also want to say that I agree with your older point that, despite this gradual movement, *anyone* can hear the difference between the Smiley sessions and the Smile sessions. Like, in the big picture, there is a clear difference between the sonic profiles of those two projects, and I think at one point earlier in this thread *you* were really just saying that, and other people were like, that's not true, and I totally see how that would be exasperating on your end too.)

But when Brian was told he needed a single, he chose to rework this song as something both commercial and exciting, and that's when it began to consume parts of other songs. First I'm in Great Shape, then Do You Like Worms, then Cabin Essence, then My Only Sunshine... songs became unusable for the next project, as they were physically disassembled, and the focus shifted entirely toward the new single. It didn't help that for the first time for The Beach Boys (this had been the case for other artists, pseudonyms, studio bands, etc), Brian needed TWO new songs. Previously, he'd relied on material from released albums to fill out the B-side, but on a new record label, he couldn't just take something off Pet Sounds, for example. The entirety of the next 5-6 months is spent trying to get a single. That's not a sign of a stable and healthy mind, it isn't productive to constantly rework one song rather than 12 at once, and it is not going to produce both a single and an album without some big changes being made.

That’s the point I was trying to make earlier but couldn’t word it right !  😎

Okay, yea, we are definitely all on the same page here!

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure at this point that I fundamentally agree with sloopjohnb72, Joshilyn, *and* guitarfool.

Brian gradually incorporated more and more minimalistic experiments into his working methods over the course of Smile into Smiley Smile, *because he thought it served the material well*, and this gradually laid the foundation for Smiley Smile. AND when the band got back from Europe there was some kind of, at the very least, heavy conversation about what direction the band would go in, which very quickly led Brian to go *all in* on this more minimalistic (but *not* necessarily less musically sophisticated) aesthetic, one which could accommodate a more congenial working method with the Beach Boys, without Brian actually giving up control over the production process.

Make of that what you will, but I'm not seeing some massive incompatibility in yall's perspectives, I'm really not!

But I actually disagree pretty strongly with most of this. I have never bought that "Brian bit off more than he could chew" line, or the "if he'd only had pro-tools" line, and I certainly don't agree that Brian Wilson wasn't *capable* of finishing Smile (although you don't exactly say that).

I actually was stating that pro tools would’ve helped him finish it..actually I was saying it wouldn’t have mattered , because he kept changing his mind on both the albums and the songs themselves too much. It was his indecision for him to make a solid decision  that made it impossible , in my view, not his musical or technical ability.

Sorry to mischaracterize you Billy, that does make more sense!

I found you.  Go Tigers.  You owe me a book in a few years--I'll trade you for mine.

 

Based on the session information posted above about how done everything was, I really think that until the end of December, 1966, Brian was making an album called Smile that was pretty damn close to finished and would have gone out in the jackets Capital Records had already printed. Yea, he changed his mind, he scrapped some things and moved some things around, but creatively, the project was working.

After December, 1966, that was no longer true. And the problem, in my view, was Heroes and Villains.

This whole message is very well said, but I'm highlighting this portion, as it rings especially true.

Like you said, things were sort of beginning to fall apart by Christmas, but there was still an album that could easily have been finished at any given moment, had the Beach Boys been given one week to complete the LP. Those 12 songs could have been finished in a rush if they needed to be.

But the big switch was David Anderle informing Brian that he needed a unique A and B side single to launch Brother Records. Brian was seemingly satisfied with Good Vibrations as the sole single for the project, until his decision to launch a record label for the Boys (which had been in the plans for about a year now) sort of snuck up behind him. There's sufficient evidence in the way that this story has been told for us to believe that Heroes had already been conceived, and maybe even recorded as a song for Smile when Brian got this news. Every session up until October 20 had not produced a piece of a song, but an entire backing track that was in need only of vocal overdubbing. So far, the process was no different than Pet Sounds, beside the fact that the tracks were not performed beginning-to-end live by the ensemble, as Brian used editing to highlight big dynamic and metric contrasts between verses and choruses that couldn't be achieved as well via a continuous performance. There's no reason to believe Heroes was an exception. On October 20, Heroes had only 2 long parts - the verse (which was originally much longer, and is cut down even on The Smile Sessions disc 2), and the Barnyard section, a fadeout which, like all of Brian's Smile fades, adds in new melodies and instruments with each round, rather than starting full steam ahead. With Brian and Van Dyke's 3 verses telling a cohesive love story set in the old west, without the "side quests" that later versions of the song will include, this works perfectly as a concise 2-part album track.

But when Brian was told he needed a single, he chose to rework this song as something both commercial and exciting, and that's when it began to consume parts of other songs. First I'm in Great Shape, then Do You Like Worms, then Cabin Essence, then My Only Sunshine... songs became unusable for the next project, as they were physically disassembled, and the focus shifted entirely toward the new single. It didn't help that for the first time for The Beach Boys (this had been the case for other artists, pseudonyms, studio bands, etc), Brian needed TWO new songs. Previously, he'd relied on material from released albums to fill out the B-side, but on a new record label, he couldn't just take something off Pet Sounds, for example. The entirety of the next 5-6 months is spent trying to get a single. That's not a sign of a stable and healthy mind, it isn't productive to constantly rework one song rather than 12 at once, and it is not going to produce both a single and an album without some big changes being made.

Man this post clarifies so, so much for me. Thank you for posting this!

That's really good -- Heroes is definitely the lynchpin; and looking at what Brian was doing--literally physically destroying songs as he sacrifices them to the fool's errand--I can imagine when he finally was as "on the other side of Heroes" as he could have been, that may have been as close to a moment where Smile was "lost" -- like the Giving Tree, Smile had given all it had to give and there was nothing left, so it had to be rebuilt--not from scratch--but from the boneyard of Smile.  He could have rebuilt it in the Classic Pet Sounds style, but with the circumstances being what they were, it felt better to rebuild it more in the mold of the lower-key things he'd been doing on and off for months?

Yes, exactly!

That's also why I believe that the last point at which the original conception of Smile was viable as a record, at which things could have gone differently, was just before Brian scrapped the Cantina mix of Heroes at the end of February. Because maybe, if he'd put that record out at that time, he could have found his way to finishing the rest of the album while he waited to see how it would do, and even if it didn't do so hot, maybe that wouldn't have been so bad, either... frequently the fear of failure is much worse than actually failing. We all know that feeling when you're so nervous about something, and then the thing you were afraid of actually happens, and like, yea, it sucks, but then it's over and you move on. Whereas the fear beforehand can be just so paralyzing.

But by March, by April, the project was just...exhausted. It needed to be renewed, rebuilt. Just like you say, building on work he'd already started, a style he'd already been experimenting with.

Also, I *do* think the Smile working method was perhaps uniquely liable to be derailed by a long delay. Because any creative person knows how hard it is to pick up a project you've set aside for months, whether it's a draft of an essay or a half-finished song or a short story. It really is, in most cases, just harder once the momentum is gone. And because of how Smile was organized, Brian would have had to do that with *every* *single* *song* if he'd wanted to finish the original session tapes in the summer of 1767. Every single song would have been - okay, what was I thinking here, what did I want to do with this, where did I put that tape, was this section on this reel or that reel. Whereas if he'd been recording songs one at a time, he could have just picked up with whatever song he'd been in the middle of. And if he'd *not* been derailed by Heroes, well than work wouldn't have been interrupted and he would have just kept going.

That’s always been my personal feeling. Again, for me realizing when the Fire incident actually  happened , well I can kind of understand more the rest of the band’s position , Mike included. I think the way Brian was acting kind of put the music in a poor light to them back in 1966. We look at the brilliance of what he was doing but put yourself in their shoes back then…and knowing how Brian changes his mind so much , and everything else that was starting to happen with him, I doubt he could explain his plans well, especially if they changed from day to day. All those brilliant parts being thrown out …that must’ve looked worrying, especially if they had no idea how it was going to sound all put together. And the fact that Brian himself didn’t know…during the album sessions… it’s one thing to have mostly finished songs and having trouble deciding which should make the cut. It’s another thing when sections of songs are being swapped in and out seemingly on a whim. Brian’s indecision didn’t kill Smile, because there was nothing to kill. Even from the beginning it seemed the concept kept changing. The fact that “Rock with me Henry” happened like that (I have the 2 cd set of TSS

I agree about understanding Mike's perspective. Brian was acting clearly mentally ill by this point often enough that you just can't really blame Mike for feeling like things were *wrong*, even if I don't think his response to that ended up helping matters.

Here’s my theory… Smiley Smile was a case of “we got the songs. Let’s do it as a band and structure them like regular songs, like we should have been doing in the first place “. That’s what was simplified . Not the production…the *structure*. I don’t think the “style” was as big of a sticking point as we all thought; I think that was more of a post Endless Summer thing. Brian was trying to capture lightning in a bottle ; it worked with Good Vibrations, but that was a once in a lifetime deal. Brian bit off more than he could chew trying to go that route for a whole album. If he’d had todays technology, it’d be easier to A/B comparison tracks without cutting tape, but that still misses the point of the issue. Brian could not finish Smile because he could not decide what it truly was, made worse because the same was true for many of the songs. The true tragedy of SMiLE is that some point during it, Brian realized it, and that’s what did him in.

But I actually disagree pretty strongly with most of this. I have never bought that "Brian bit off more than he could chew" line, or the "if he'd only had pro-tools" line, and I certainly don't agree that Brian Wilson wasn't *capable* of finishing Smile (although you don't exactly say that).

To me, you just can't escape the fact that Capital Records printed up however many thousands of record jackets with twelve songs listed on them, and that most of those 12 songs had had tons of work done on them and were pretty close to finished. Brian Wilson was a professional, commercially-minded, experienced record producer. Those record jackets would have been a powerful incentive to stick to that track list. As I learned from this very thread, Wonderful and Wind Chimes had been set aside as masters. Most of the other songs were more finished than not. And even to your point about the Elements. Earlier in this thread, we were speculating that the Elements was one of the least-finished tracks. But if you accept that Brian had decided that, instead of an Elements Suite, he would just have a big fire song - well, call it The Elements: Mrs. O'Leary's Cow on the disc, use "I wanna be Around" as the fade, and that's pretty damn close to finished to! And if Brian then decided he'd rather do something quieter, "a candle" - well, that change was in no way, shape, or form a threat to the integrity of the project. Brian just had to go in and record his candle music, and call *that* the Elements.

Based on the session information posted above about how done everything was, I really think that until the end of December, 1966, Brian was making an album called Smile that was pretty damn close to finished and would have gone out in the jackets Capital Records had already printed. Yea, he changed his mind, he scrapped some things and moved some things around, but creatively, the project was working.

After December, 1966, that was no longer true. And the problem, in my view, was Heroes and Villains.

In my opinion (and this is about as subjective as it gets), there is no version of Heroes and Villains that feels like a smash hit. None of 'em. And I think Brian new that.

And I would venture, tentatively (and I'd never thought of this before, so I'm thinking out loud here, developing a new theory of smile as we speak!) that when Brian conceived of Heroes and Villains with Van Dyke Parks in the late summer of 1966, that was probably okay. Brian didn't *need* Heroes and Villains to be a huge smash. Good Vibrations was going to be the huge smash. Heroes and Villains was going to be the quirky, more experimental second single. After all, California Girls was a huge smash, Little Girl I Once Knew wasn't. I Get Around, huge. Do You Wanna Dance, not so huge. In the world of popular music in the mid-60s, not every single had to be massive. I'm sure Brian wanted Heroes and Villains to do well, but it's commercial potential was not *that* important, certainly not an existential issue for the band!

By January, despite Good Vibrations massive success, that was no longer true. Again, this is theorizing, thinking out loud...but Brian Wilson was losing confidence in Smile, and making Heroes and Villains a hit came to feel very, very important to him. Perhaps it came to feel like the only way he could prove to the rest of the band that the new direction he was pursuing was the right one. But Heroes and Villains wasn't a huge hit, and nothing Brian did was going to make it one, because it was a weird ass novelty record about the old west. Brilliant, yes, international number 1, probably not so much. And that quandary - how to turn a song that was fundamentally, because of its *original* purpose and conception, going to stall out on the charts and confuse teenagers in dance clubs everywhere, into a smash hit, is the problem that Brian Wilson could not solve, that no one could have solved, to which no solution existed. *Not* how to make a whole album using modular recording methods, because Brian Wilson had figured that part out, actually.

I hope any future projects about Smile take into consideration all of the various factors surrounding it, and if a project relies on existing and newly-found documentation, those sources are not used to promote a narrative, editorialize, or back up opinions as fact, but instead are shown as part of the timeline free of any narratives or opinions on what the documents actually show.

Let readers and listeners judge for themselves. Ultimately if someone listens to the Smile timeline material, recorded before June 1967, and then listens to the Smiley Smile material, they will be able to form their own opinions about the similarities and differences without being told what or how to think, or that the opinion they have is wrong. If the timeline and documents are used to suggest things that literally no one except those directly involved firsthand could confirm or deny, and promote some opinions over others where both are valid, it becomes an op-ed piece rather than true journalism or historical research.

Guitarfool, I really appreciate your replies in this thread, too. And as I said above, I still find some of your assertions early in this thread very persuasive, albeit (as you yourself have said, I think?), more as something well worth considering than as an overarching ur-narrative. But truly, it takes two perspectives to have a conversation! Whatever anyone decides to believe, if you hadn't made the statements you made about Smiley Smile and the touring band, Joshilyn and sloopjohnb would not have had anything to refute (leaving aside, for the moment, whether that refutation was or was not convincing!), and I would not have learned a great deal that I have learned, both about Smile and about the new research being done on it!

I do feel like I have to say though, that - in my opinion - historians *always* tell a story. We always make an argument. There is always a narrative. Humans cannot organize information without narrative, not really. Even on things like timelines, charts, lists, indexes, the narrative of the compiler *always* shapes the information they present and how they organize it. There is simply no way around it. Better, thus, to have people be open about what they believe, what they think the evidence shows. And we, as readers and listeners, simple have no choice but to sift fact from argument ourselves. There is no way around it. Every newspaper article, every textbook, every collection of historical documents - there is always a narrative and an argument, whether it is explicit or not. This does not invalidate that work, does not mean it is not true historical research, it just means that we never have the luxury of turning off our brains and assuming we are looking at "just the facts!"

Any time! Alright, I'll happily keep going.

The most obvious suggestion of what those Jan 23 sessions were for are the AFM contracts. The first from 3pm-6pm is titled 'SURF'S UP', and the second (a sweetening session following immediately) from 6.30pm-11.30pm was given the title 'PART ONE'. Considering Brian's working habits at the time of re-doing everything that didn't need to be re-done, and the December 15 piano/vocal recording probably supplanting the November 4 track, that just seems like the most believable thing he'd be doing.

There are some curious things about the personnel that'd support this, too. The first session would in theory be a pretty similar instrumental lineup to the November session - Hal on percussion, Carl and Bill Pitman on guitar/bass, Lyle Ritz on bass, Roy Caton on trumpet, presumably Brian on piano - but really intriguingly, there are three woodwind players. Now, Carl recorded a remake of the 1st Movement track in 1971, mostly mimicking Brian's arrangement from the November track down to the note... but for some reason, he's got three baritone saxes on there, all holding a droning bassline. Where else would he have gotten that musical idea while otherwise rote copying Brian's work on the other track? That, for me, is the strongest suggestion of what they recorded that day. It's only a little thing, but I really can't let go of it.

The sweetening session and missing status of the tape is all pretty fishy. Ten string players are compensated normally, while the AFM sheet indicates a whole horn section and harpist were paid for their services but sent home without being used, which is a total one-off. If Siegel's anecdote about a studio full of violinists being sent home because the vibrations weren't right has a ring of truth, this is the only session that'd remotely fit the bill.

This is really, really interesting, thanks for posting. I totally buy it, at least til better evidence emerges!

And if it is true, it really is just more evidence for what is, for me, an increasingly inescapable conclusion...which is that the Smile project fundamentally fell apart because Brian lost the thread of it. Yea, you can still argue about *why* he lost the thread, how much of it was external factors and how much internal, whatever. But, again, if this is true, for me, there's just no way around the fact that anyone who would re-record Part 1 of Surf's Up has lost the thread of what they're doing. That original recording is one of the greatest things recorded in the 20th century. If you can't tell it's fine as it is....

You're a professional!  Well, at least tell me what the focus of your research is, then?? 

I work on the colonization of the Hudson Valley in New York, the dispossession of Native people, and the establishment of large estates in that region that had "Lords" and tenant farmers! Which honestly with my user name is probably enough info to find me...but I don't think there's any reason why I need to be perfectly anonymous on a Beach Boys message board (at least, I certainly hope not!)

Brilliant post. Worn out after the other post I just made, so I'm short on words, but couldn't agree more with you here. There are few approaching the work of the Beach Boys today as thoughtfully and intelligently as Joshilyn. And I'm very much with you on the Smile to Smiley transition! I personally wouldn't make a claim that they're one in the same. Certainly, at some point, there was a talk about (mostly) recording an album from scratch with a new approach, and it can't have been too long before Brian said, "Gee, this isn't really Smile anymore," and little Barry Turnbull said "Smiley Smile", unknowingly sparking violent confrontations on something called a 'website' with the same title in 55 years' time. The case is more that Brian's musical development can be traced logically from Pet Sounds to Smiley Smile without the shift being quite such an inexplicable or inorganic change in his methods.

Thanks for the praise... I was a little worried that post would be all a little too much, so I'm glad people are appreciating it!

Re: Brian's musical development. The honest truth is, there is part of me that has trouble with this argument, that instinctively leans more towards guitarfool's theory that there could have been some kind of big blow-up in 1967 that led to a wholesale rethinking of how Brian was working. With every post the "continuity" folks post that theory is crumbling...but Rome didn't fall in a day, you know?

And I guess part of it is that...in a totally qualitative, just-what-I-hear sense, I've long felt that all of Brian's work in the 60s did not proceed in quite as neat an arc as is sometimes assumed. It has always felt to me - and again, these are feelings, not facts or even theories - that there was a certain kinship between Today and Pet Sounds, and also a certain kinship between Summer Days and Smile. That the backing tracks to California Girls, Help Me Rhonda, and Let Him Run Wild have a certain indefinable relationship with Wind Chimes, Good Vibrations, or Cabinessence, a kinship not quite shared with anything on Pet Sounds, while Pet Sounds built more directly on what Brian was going for on Kiss Me Baby or In the Back of My Mind than anything on Summer Days. And this feeling has led me to think that Brian's story was never so simple as someone evolving forward from record to record, that it was more like someone juggling threads of sound and feel that interested him.

In this light, Smiley Smile seems to me like a dramatic pulling out of what had been a minor thread and turning it into the major thread. Sort of like how there had always been car songs, but Little Deuce Coupe was *all* car songs, Smiley was a whole album of I'm Bugged at My Old Man crossed with And Your Dreams Come True. Where before that particular looser, funnier, less-rock-n-roll approach had been only a small part of what Brian did. Does that make any sense to anyone?

I'm actually very excited to learn you're an historian of the 18th century -- I don't know if you want to share publicly, but would you mind directing me to some of your work?  I am definitely one of those people who has read a couple (hundred) books about the Colonies and think I know a thing or two but could be put in my place in seconds.  Mainly because I've forgotten too much of what I read -- if you're not in it every day you lose it...

Okay, full confession...I'm at the tail end of my PhD program and not quite published yet Clearly, I feel entitled to call myself a professional! But you'll have to give me a couple years before I can send you a book!

And re: "if you're not in it every day you lose it", aint that the truth! The things I've known in my life....

Whew... What a whirlwind. I'd like to wheel this back to something fun/informative/interesting and run down the state of each song recorded during the Smile period and where they were left before the home studio, to the best available evidence, which BJL already excellently compiled back in the innocent days of page 1, but I have some amendments and additions to throw into the pool. That should be a relatively harmless way to set a few things on the record straight!

God I love this sh*t! It just never gets old for me! Thanks for writing all this out.

Mysterious session on Jan 23 is lost to time, but a number of things point to it more likely being a remake of the first half than anything else. I'd explain those things if I hadn't already gone on for way too long.

Not to ask you to do a ton of work or anything, but I would, personally, be very, very curious to see this explained, if you did want to!

Whoa! I go away for a weekend and this thread totally explodes! I'm not gonna lie, this was pretty fun to read through, even if the conversation got a little rough at spots And I hope no one minds if I jump in with a few thoughts on historiography...it's kind of my thing. Short essay incoming.....

First, I want to say that anyone who is wondering why Joshilyn Hoisington gets to tell other people they're wrong now and again, and why said people should take said corrections with grace, should spend a couple of hours listening to her work on youtube and recognize that certain kinds of incredibly intensive knowledge production and expertise deserve to be respected. I am not saying that we don't all get to have our own opinions on Smile, but when you're working off of secondary sources, many of which were written a long time ago, and other people in the thread are doing direct, primary-source research and very, very sophisticated musicological analysis, that gives them a certain authority in the conversation that, frankly, should be respected. I am a professional historian who writes about 18th-century America. I absolutely can be, have been, and will be wrong about various aspects of that history, but that doesn't change the fact that I have spent countless hours pouring over handwritten documents from the 18th century, and if someone comes along and tells me that they read a couple books on the American Revolution and that their opinion is just as valid as mine...well... I'm going to nod politely and end the conversation, what else can I say?

That said, although there is some absolutely incredible new-to-me (new-to-everyone?) information in this thread about the timeline of recording, I also think that there is an interpretive question about whether Smiley Smile was a gradual evolution of the Smile music, or whether Smiley Smile represented a profound break. And this is a very interesting question to me--and also why I brought up my day job. Because historians have been fighting for *ever* over whether the American Revolution is fundamentally a story about change, a profound break with what came before, or whether the American Revolution is actually a story of continuity, in which colonial elites used the war to preserve the world they'd already built from changes they believed the British Empire was trying to impose on them. In short, how revolutionary was the Revolution, really? As is often the case, there is some truth to both perspectives. Facts and arguments have been marshaled on both sides. New ways of thinking, new ideas, and new information uncovered from archives historians had not previously looked at can certainly change our perspective on this issue, but at the end of the day, the question seems to have proven absolutely impossible for historians to settle. There always seem to be historians ready to say that the American Revolution was fundamentally about change, and others ready to say it was fundamentally about continuity. It is a profound interpretive question that, unlike many other kinds of questions historians ask, does not seem capable of being solved simply be examining the evidence.

Part of what I see in the thread above is Joshilyn and others presenting very, very important new research and new knowledge--research and knowledge, I want to stress, that I am so, so, so excited to see and hear about and that I appreciate so, so much--and using that new research to support a particular interpretive argument: that the transition from Smile to Smiley Smile was not the profound break we thought it was, that instead that transition was characterized by a certain continuity of musical development, and that viewing that transition in this way provides us with tremendous insight into Brian Wilson's development as a musician in the 1960s.

I largely buy this argument. It is sophisticated and important. *But* Smiley Smile and Smile unquestionably *are* different. They have different titles, different qualities, and were produced under different conditions. And so, to my mind, the question of whether this transitional moment was characterized primarily by continuity, or primarily by a revolutionary change in working methods and aims, is an interpretive question that cannot be settled by evidence alone, and so any assertion that new research *proves* that Smiley Smile was an extension of Smile, and not a break with Smile, needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

I hope I haven't bored you all to tears, and one more time I want to thank everyone participating in good faith in this thread and everyone doing new research on this important moment in musical history! I would also suggest that the best history happens when people look for what is interesting and right in other people's perspectives, not when they go straight for the weakest point (which doesn't mean that factual errors shouldn't be corrected!)

One way I would describe how “close” the “Smile” album ever was to being “finished” would be to point to the circa 1995 Paley sessions. The comparison is only apt in this specific way: Andy Paley has gone on record saying the Beach Boys could have cut vocals for *an entire album* of that material in two days.

Similarly, it’s easy to look at the “Smile” assembly presented at the front of the “Smile Sessions” box and say “well, all we need is the following overdubs…..” Even if we ignore that the circa 2003 work on compiling a “finished” album accomplished a lot of the compositional work to getting the track flow to seem “complete”, and we just assume for the sake of argument that the assembly as presented on the 2011 set could have existed in 1967 and just needed X number of overdubs, a very similar problem presents itself as what happened decades later on the Paley material.

Namely, get all of the creators and band members in there to do the work. There are approximately 87 roadblocks to making that happen. Yes, the Paley project had more business/internal politics issues than “Smile” did (arguably, certainly *different* types of those issues). But there’s a TON of BB material, and just projects in general, that are seemingly *so* close to happening, yet are a million miles away.

And that’s not even getting into truly actual *finished* projects that have been shelved.

along those lines, Brian must have considered Van Dyke Park's work unfinished, or else it wouldn't have been such a big deal when he quit the project. So assuming that the lyrics we have represent the lyrics that Brian and Van Dyke Parks assumed they would need is also probably a mistake.

Edit: another thought on this theme: during the Pet Sounds sessions, Brian often seems to have recorded a scratch vocal while the band was away for songs, like Here Today or I know There's an Answer, that were presumably always intended for other band members, or like Wouldn't it be Nice that weren't. I was *going* to say that Brian didn't do that as often on the Smile material, probably because before he could record a scratch vocal, he had to assemble the backing track from its various pieces, and that this extra step ended up getting on the way of things getting finished. But then it occurred to me, thinking about Bicycle Rider's comment early in the thread about Wonderful possibly being intended for Carl from the beginning, that actually Brian *was* doing this, and that the vocals we have on songs like Wonderful or Wind Chimes were just guide vocals, in which case actually Brian had done almost no recording of lead vocals at all. Which would feed into the theory that getting the Beach Boys together to do the necessary work was a big part of the problem.