Since the Baldwin organ was mentioned, I think it's worth noting how the band spent a lot of money to crate and ship Brian's Baldwin organ to Hawaii for those August '67 shows. Not suggesting anything other than by doing that, they were putting what was perhaps one of the main sonic hooks of Smiley Smile on stage in Hawaii, and perhaps (just perhaps...) trying to give their setlist of old hits the "Smiley sound".

They could easily have rented an Hammond or any other organ in Hawaii with far less cost and difficulty, why specifically spend that much to ship the Baldwin there unless it was going for a certain sound and vibe that would be on their proposed live album a few months later?

It should also be noted that the Hawaii shows were a unique recording experience, during which the Beach Boys were producing material for the next album to follow Smiley Smile. Are you suggesting that the Baldwin may have been introduced as a permanent instrument?

We know that this is not the case. Brian was requested to go, and he insisted on bringing that big ol' thing. Because it was his instrument that he wanted to play. We're talking about the same guy who would rent a piano from Sunset Sound and have it moved by professional piano movers a few blocks down the street to Western, because he liked the sound of Sunset's detuned tack, and the room sound of Western.

Vega-Tables, as it stood in late 1966, had just a piano, and that is a fact. This is because it best suited the song as it was written. But notice that more songs are being better suited by a sparse arrangement. Eventually, the songs that are initially heavily arranged, are eventually considered to be "better suited" by a sparse arrangement. This is what we call a shift, and objectively, that is what happened.

Guitarfool - I'm agreeing with you! But I'm also saying that it is not a coincidence that the amount of songs that are better suited by this new arrangement style is increasing over the months, and this is very traceable. I also don't doubt that the boys had some undocumented talks about this back in June 1967. It is pretty clear that our perspectives on this era complement each other.

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!

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, when the songs were never incorporated into the live set in any way, the instrumentation is completely different from what the touring band used, the studio effects are no less pronounced, the tempo shifts are more noticeable, and the entire album is characterized by the sound of 2 very distinct instruments - the Baldwin organ on its buzziest setting, and Brian's specially (de)tuned grand piano, which are not close to the sound of the live band in any way, shape, or form.

But everything else? Yeah, it makes sense! People are agreeing here more than we think.  

That's Not Me doesn't stand out particularly to me as something minimalist compared to other Pet Sounds tracks, besides the knowledge that it was completely put together by The Boys. Consider the instrumentation:

Hammond C-3 organ
Electric guitar
Electric 12-string guitar
Another electric 12-string guitar
Electric bass
Another electric bass
Drums
Tambourine
Another tambourine
Castanets amplified through a Leslie speaker

Really, it's just something that didn't require the wrecking crew, as it's the only song on the album that features purely rhythm instruments, with no horns or strings. Compare this to the instrumentation of Vega-Tables:

Piano

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?

I see it as a composer, arranger, and producer doing what he thought best suited the material at hand and what he thought would work for each song. One of the most common pieces of advice I've heard top producers and engineers give to students and at various clinics and interviews is always make decisions which serve the song, not the other way around. If Brian heard those arrangements for those songs, I think it's just that with no other implications; You may see it as a move toward minimalism, and I don't share that opinion, so we can agree to disagree. If he didn't hear a 14 piece ensemble on "Wonderful" or any of the other tracks, or he didn't want the "Good Vibrations sound" on every song he wrote, that was Brian doing what he thought best served the song.

To me that feels like too zoomed-in of a perspective.

I'm not looking this up right now, so I could be wrong, but I believe the last time Brian used 3 people to do a basic track was probably I'm So Young on Today?  (Not counting IBAMOM, obviously, which has a lot in common with Smiley anyway, and the a capella stuff.)  So there is a pattern of Brian hearing big ensembles on like, 25 straight productions with the previous exceptions noted.  You are unwilling to even consider that a person who had done a big string of big productions who then starts doing some smaller productions might be entertaining the idea of doing smaller productions?  I'm having trouble understanding what your resistance is to this.

I'm just calling it as I see it! If he thought those songs would be better served by a more sparse arrangement, that's exactly what he worked up for them and recorded. I just don't see any bigger implications behind those decisions that are made with basically any song in the production process. Was "Yesterday" anything beyond the Beatles and their producer thinking the song would be better served by a string quartet and guitar accompaniment rather than the standard "Beatles" lineup heard on all the songs that surrounded it?

Well... if half of the Help album consisted of tracks with 1 or 2 instruments, and then the entirety of Rubber Soul reflected that noticeably different change in style, I think you might have a comparison.

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.

Couldn't have said it better.

This was Brian at his most indecisive. A few days were enough time for him to completely change his mind on the structure, the arrangement, or the feel of a certain song. Many of them had been remade from scratch a few times, just days apart already. When you change those days to months, to the point where Brian hadn't even looked at the majority of the album for half a year? Of course he's going to restart most of it.

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.

Wow! I very much like the direction this thread has headed. BJL, thanks very much for your kind words, and I appreciate all the appreciation 

One thing I would like to add to the Smiley Smile talk is something that sort of gets ignored in conversations about the "shift"...

The Beach Boys' role in the music did not change in any significant capacity between Smile and Smiley Smile. The instruments are still mostly played by Brian on his own (where before it was some combination of Brian on his own, Brian and Van Dyke, or the wrecking crew), although Carl and Dennis do contribute pretty significantly here and there. But... that hadn't changed very much from the Smile period. Carl and Dennis, especially Carl, were much more involved as instrumentalists throughout the Smile era than the Pet Sounds era. Brian began treating Carl as a wrecking crew member again, including him as a bassist/guitarist on big band sessions like Wind Chimes and Cabin Essence, while a lot of the homier, more low-key tracks were entirely done by Brian and his brothers. To give a few examples, He Gives Speeches has all instruments played by Brian, Carl, and Dennis, as do both unique chorus sections for the April version of Vegetables.

If The Beach Boys felt like hired hands during Smile, well, their role demonstrably did not change. According to all 6 of the Beach Boys, and made clear from the session tapes, all of the material recorded for Smiley Smile was arranged and produced by Brian Wilson. Carl and Dennis played here and there, just like they'd done on Smile, and all of the Beach Boys recorded harmonies under the direction of Brian, just like they'd done on Smile.

So, what did change that made everyone so much happier?

Well, I know I'm a guy that pretty much only talks about the music (it's what I know best), but it's no secret that the 'vibe' was completely different. Brian's closest friends were his brothers and his cousin and Al again - the band. Brian wasn't recording side projects with others and leaving the rest of the band in the dark as to what the music was anymore. And the big one: Brian and Mike were writing together again! In limited capacity, as most of the songs were re-recordings of Wilson/Parks material, but it's still an important thing to consider when we're trying to figure out why the dynamic changed so significantly.

The Beach Boys were no less hired hands on Smiley Smile than they were on Smile. But, there are circumstances where being a hired hand feels good, and there are circumstances where it feels bad, to put it extremely simply. Consider the massive difference in atmosphere, and how drastically that can improve the tense relations the band was having before.

Well, the title Mrs. O'Leary's Fire was given immediately after the session, according to Goodbye Surfing, Hello God. Here's the fire-relevant section:

It was just another day of greatness at Gold Star Recording Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. In the morning four long-haired kids had knocked out two hours of sound for a record plugger who was trying to curry favor with a disc jockey friend of theirs in San Jose. Nobody knew it at the moment, but out of that two hours there were about three minutes that would hit the top of the charts in a few weeks, and the record plugger, the disc jockey and the kids would all be hailed as geniuses, but geniuses with a very small g.

Now, however, in the very same studio a Genius with a very large capital G was going to produce a hit. There was no doubt it would be a hit because this Genius was Brian Wilson. In four years of recording for Capitol Records, he and his group, the Beach Boys, had made surfing music a national craze, sold 16 million singles and earned gold records for 10 of their 12 albums.

Not only was Brian going to produce a hit, but also, one gathered, he was going to show everybody in the music business exactly where it was at; and where it was at, it seemed, was that Brian Wilson was not merely a Genius—which is to say a steady commercial success—but rather, like Bob Dylan and John Lennon, a GENIUS—which is to say a steady commercial success and hip besides.

Until now, though, there were not too many hip people who would have considered Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys hip, even though he had produced one very hip record, “Good Vibrations,” which had sold more than a million copies, and a super-hip album, Pet Sounds, which didn’t do very well at all—by previous Beach Boys sales standards. Among the hip people he was still on trial, and the question discussed earnestly among the recognized authorities on what is and what is not hip was whether or not Brian Wilson was hip, semi-hip or square.

But walking into the control room with the answers to all questions such as this was Brian Wilson himself, wearing a competition-stripe surfer’s T-shirt, tight white duck pants, pale green bowling shoes and a red plastic fireman’s helmet.

Everybody was wearing identical red plastic toy fireman’s helmets. Brian’s cousin and production assistant, Steve Korthof was wearing one; his wife, Marilyn, and her sister, Diane Rovell—Brian’s secretary—were also wearing them, and so was a once dignified writer from The Saturday Evening Post who had been following Brian around for two months.

Out in the studio, the musicians for the session were unpacking their instruments. In sport shirts and slacks, they looked like insurance salesmen and used-car dealers, except for one blond female percussionist who might have been stamped out by a special machine that supplied plastic mannequin housewives for detergent commercials.

Controlled, a little bored after 20 years or so of nicely paid anonymity, these were the professionals of the popular music business, hired guns who did their jobs expertly and efficiently and then went home to the suburbs. If you wanted swing, they gave you swing. A little movie-track lushness? Fine, here comes movie-track lushness. Now it’s rock and roll? Perfect rock and roll, down the chute.

“Steve,” Brian called out, “where are the rest of those fire hats? I want everybody to wear fire hats. We’ve really got to get into this thing.” Out to the Rolls-Royce went Steve and within a few minutes all of the musicians were wearing fire hats, silly grins beginning to crack their professional dignity.

“All right, let’s go,” said Brian. Then, using a variety of techniques ranging from vocal demonstration to actually playing the instruments, he taught each musician his part. A gigantic fire howled out of the massive studio speakers in a pounding crash of pictorial music that summoned up visions of roaring, windstorm flames, falling timbers, mournful sirens and sweating firemen, building into a peak and crackling off into fading embers as a single drum turned into a collapsing wall and the fire-engine cellos dissolved and disappeared.

“When did he write this?” asked an astonished pop music producer who had wandered into the studio. “This is really fantastic! Man, this is unbelievable! How long has he been working on it?”

“About an hour,” answered one of Brian’s friends.

“I don’t believe it. I just can’t believe what I’m hearing,” said the producer and fell into a stone glazed silence as the fire music began again.

For the next three hours, Brian Wilson recorded and re-recorded, take after take, changing the sound balance, adding echo, experimenting with a sound effects track of a real fire.

“Let me hear that again.” “Drums, I think you’re a little slow in that last part. Let’s get right on it.” “That was really good. Now, one more time, the whole thing.” “All right, let me hear the cellos alone.” “Great. Really great. Now let’s do it!”

With 23 takes on tape and the entire operation responding to his touch like the black knobs on the control board, sweat glistening down his long, reddish hair onto his freckled face, the control room a litter of dead cigarette butts, Chicken Delight boxes, crumpled napkins, Coke bottles and all the accumulated trash of the physical end of the creative process, Brian stood at the board as the four speakers blasted the music into the room.

For the 24th time, the drum crashed and the sound effects crackle faded and stopped.

“Thank you,” said Brian into the control room mic. “Let me hear that back.” Feet shifting, his body still, eyes closed, head moving seal-like to his music, he stood under the speakers and listened. “Let me hear that one more time.” Again the fire roared. “Everybody come out and listen to this,” Brian said to the musicians. They came into the room and listened to what they had made.

“What do you think?” Brian asked.

“It’s incredible, incredible,” whispered one of the musicians, a man in his fifties wearing a Hawaiian shirt and iridescent trousers and pointed black Italian shoes. “Absolutely incredible.”

“Yeah,” said Brian on the way home, an acetate trial copy or “dub” of the tape in his hands, the red plastic fire helmet still on his head. “Yeah, I’m going to call this ‘Mrs. O’Leary’s Fire’ and I think it might just scare a whole lot of people.”

As it turns out, however, Brian Wilson’s magic fire music is not going to scare anybody—because nobody other than the few people who heard it in the studio will ever get to listen to it. A few days after the record was finished, a building across the street from the studio burned down and, according to Brian, there was also an unusually large number of fires in Los Angeles. Afraid that his music might in fact turn out to be magic fire music, Wilson destroyed the master.

“I don’t have to do a big scary fire like that,” he later said. “I can do a candle and it’s still a fire. That would have been a really bad vibration to let out on the world, that Chicago fire. The next one is going to be a candle.”

Now, to separate my analysis of the recordings from the raw facts themselves, here are some things we know without my personal input as to what it all means:

- The Elements was, at one point, the title of a song that contained the lyric "My vega-tables"
- The Elements was, at another point, listed as 1 of 12 songs to be on Smile, along with other songs called Vega-Tables, Wind Chimes, etc.
- The only recording to be produced with the title "The Elements" was "Part 1" or "Fire", recorded November 28, 1966

Billy, yes, there's no reason to believe any of Brian's ideas for the "air" element were ever put to tape, and that quote essentially confirms that they never were.

Frank Holmes' artwork confirms that at some point, The Elements was a song that contained the lyric "my vega-tables." Perhaps it was simply the name of the song that would later be called Vega-Tables, or perhaps Vega-Tables was initially planned to be part of some large suite. But by the time the list of tracks was written out, which was written in time for Capitol's art department to deliver the back cover by December 6, "Vega-Tables" and "The Elements" were the names of two separate songs on Smile.

The only recording session, and piece of music, that is referred to as "The Elements" in any form, is the Fire session on November 28. Larry Levine slates it as "part 1" of a song called The Elements, and as everyone knows, it was the section that represented fire. But the final master, according to the AFM contract, was 2:25 long, and as Brian was driving home from the session, he made the decision that he would be calling it "Mrs. O'Leary's Fire." It seems to me that this means that "Mrs. O'Leary's Fire" would have been the title of the song, rather than "The Elements", and that the 4 part idea was out the window. The title "The Elements" was not used again throughout the remainder of the sessions.

I don't doubt that Brian had ideas for water, air, and earth, or that the water ideas eventually found their way into what became Cool, Cool Water, or that the air section was written and planned. But it seems to me that when Brian got spooked by the fires, he became paranoid and left the idea behind. We know that he didn't intend to use the fire section for very long, as that happened soon after the session, but it even seems that the idea had shifted from an Elements song with multiple sections representing different aspects of nature, into a song purely about fire, even on the very day the fire section was started. Brian's comment to the reporter in the car, along with the fact that he edited together a song-length 2:25 take of the recording for further overdubs, suggest that the initial concept for the song had radically changed already.

To insist that "The Elements" must have been made up of other, completely separate songs, is to forget that The Elements was... a Song, on an album with 11 or so other Songs. Vega-Tables was undoubtably connected by some point, but The Elements and Vega-Tables were demonstrably separate entities at another point. Wind Chimes was never connected, existed in a final mono form this entire time, and was also listed separately to The Elements and Vega-Tables on that tracklist. Never connected in any way

I count 4 claims in that message that are objectively untrue, as they are contradicted by the documentation that I have access to, and are founded upon absolutely nothing. I can't do this anymore, sorry.

I like the discussion too; it's fun. I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but when misinformation is spread about The Beach Boys' recording career, I feel some responsibility to correct it so that impressionable fans don't get the wrong ideas about the music. This isn't related to what the band said to each other behind closed doors, the fights that occur off the records, etc, etc, because no one can ever know about that for sure. And it is fun as hell to speculate.

But when the theories are founded on information that is just not true, such as the water chant being recorded for LTSDD in May, or the entirety of LTSDD being a section of The Elements, the truth needs to be clarified. If you don't quite understand what I'm saying regarding the documentation and what it shows, that's fine. But if you're continuing to "stick to your own beliefs" when your beliefs have been shown to be founded on misconceptions, and when they are directly contradicted by actual evidence, you are just choosing not to believe facts. Which is fine, but it's not something I like seeing spread about my favorite band, and my favorite era of my favorite band, when there's already so much confusion and misinformation, about admittedly a very confusing album(s) and time period.

This isn't a logical conversation, though, if we're going to ignore actual evidence in favor of objective falsities simply because we like them better. It's not a conversation I wish to continue, as it feels a little bit like trying to explain that the earth isn't flat to some older relatives. I do hope that other people appreciate some of the new found info, and the attempt at narrowing down the truth.

When presented with new information on when pieces were recorded, and when we have the history of the music completely backwards, the logical next step would not be to think "Well, I'll continue to believe this baseless theory/assumption until there's evidence that directly states otherwise." The more reasonable reaction would be, "Wait, was there ever any reason to believe that in the first place, now that documentation, tape box info, and other info is more accessible to fans?"

The answer, in this case, is a resounding no.

I've given a history of the song, and a bit of history as to how this misconception came to be, how it persisted, and why it makes no sense now that we have a timeline of Brian's works. The only recording session for a song called "The Elements" came with "Part 1" of the song, on November 28, 1966. On the way home from the session, Brian had given the song another name. A few days later (I believe the exact date was found in another thread on here!) Brian scrapped the idea completely due to his paranoia about fires. He made a comment about a candle instead of a fire, but no recording session connected to the title "The Elements" ever occurred again.

Love to Say Da Da was recorded, in every occasion, as "Love to Say Da Da." If it was a part of The Elements, you would hear Jimmy Hilton say, "THE ELEMENTS, PART TWOOOO!" in a goofy voice. But that's not what the song was called. It was called Love to Say Da Da. We don't need evidence that Good Vibrations was never a bridge for You Still Believe in Me... but we can say there's no evidence that suggests that, and therefore no reason to believe it. And once again, the timeline of contemporary documentation AND quotes from Brian in articles shows that the two songs likely never even co-existed.

By the way, how much interest is there in the actual facts regarding dates and documents and when splices were made, etc? I would think that would be right up the alley of every Smile fan on earth, but I've been surprised to see a lot of the info, which has been revealed here for the first time, completely ignored! Brian splicing the Worms verse from Worms (which he'd otherwise just chopped up for Heroes) and planning to use it as an intro for the original Da Da, via notes on the tape box? I thought that would get a big reaction!

Putting aside the debates regarding contemporary quotes and what they mean re Smile's transition into Smiley Smile, I'm surprised that most of the new information that's being given in this thread from original documents is kind of getting washed over. That's the part that fascinates me the most - the music, and exactly how, when, and where it was made. Through that, Brian's rapidly changing plans can be traced, as can his increasing interesting in minimal tracks, and instruments that are stacked by himself, rather than played by a live ensemble.

Just wanted to pipe up and say that I've appreciated the discussion in this thread and the very interesting, informative, and thought-provoking contributions that've been made.

And it got me in the mood to listen to the Smiley material on the Sunshine Tomorrow releases...so thanks all around!

Hell yeah. Sunshine Tomorrow rules!

If it's being contested that Cool Cool Water is a rewrite of LTSDD because of Brian saying he wrote CCW in March 1967... he was off by a few months. Remember, this is him explaining when he wrote it years later. At his Grammy speech, he claimed Smile was recorded in 1965, and in the new documentary, he said That Lucky Old Sun premiered in 2005. Demonstrably, he's just a little bit off in his memory of when LTSDD was rewritten as CCW. Again, people can misremember things, but music doesn't lie. Listen to the songs. They are the same. That is how the "LTSDD is Water" rumor started in the first place.

I am pretty confused at some of these questions, but there's more misinfo that I feel the need to correct.

Love to Say Da Da was first recorded, under that title, in December 1966. It was recorded again in May 1967.

Cool Cool Water was recorded at Western Recorders in June.

If you're contesting that the two songs share similarities - please relisten; the chord progressions are identical, the bass lines are identical - it's a reworking of the same basic musical material, with a shift in lyrical matter from babies to water. Counter melodies played by instruments in Love to Say Da Da are reprised by vocal parts in various editions of Cool Cool Water.

The chant where they all sing "water, water" over a drone is not a recording that was made for a song called Love to Say Da Da. As we said earlier, it is labeled as "Cool Cool Water - Fade" on the tape box, and was recorded in Brian's home studio using his Baldwin organ during either the Smiley Smile era or the Wild Honey era. It is a section of Cool Cool Water that was recorded under that name. So, no version of Cool Cool Water worked on by the Beach Boys "included Love to Say Da Da", unless of course, you refer to the musical material being based in that original song.

The idea that Love to Say Da Da was part of Brian's "Elements" song comes from the fact that it's a variation of the same music as Cool Cool Water, which obviously pulls from ideas Brian had about recording music about water, although that never happened during the proper Smile era. It was assumed then that LTSDD was part of Brian's elements idea. Again, this sounds logical, but we know things about Smile that weren't known in the 80s when people first got that notion. We know when things were recorded, how songs evolved, etc. That assumption has been repeated a lot, by several different authors who don't dive into the specifics of what songs Brian was working on in what stages of the project. There are absolutely zero sources that back this theory up, and there is plenty of evidence that suggests exactly when Brian was working on The Elements, what it consisted of at each stage, and when he left the idea behind. I sent a pretty thorough message on that a few pages back.

What is it if it's not a section of The Elements? ...It's a song called Love to Say Da Da. That's why we're able to refer to it as a song with a title. It had one. It is slated that way, that title is written on tape boxes by different engineers at different studios, and all the paperwork matches.

Liz, for the record, you did say that, because I copied it from your message and pasted it into my own without typing it.

Speculation is fun, but learning things that objectively happened is pretty cool too - I've posted some facts about the tapes and what they reveal about Brian's plans at the time, and I don't think some of that information was previously available. Isn't that exciting new info that reveals much more specifics about the project than vague quotes?

Of course contemporary quotes need to be considered alongside documented evidence, in order to paint the full picture of what happened. It's all very useful! There's just no need to speculate on Carl saying they "recorded from scratch" and what it could mean while ignoring the actual music on the tapes. We can definitively say things like:

-Wind Chimes and Wonderful were recorded in the home studio from scratch
-Little Pad was recorded from scratch in the home studio, and possibly written then
-Heroes and Villains uses the October 20 verse backing track, although the vocals and organ were overdubbed in the home studio, and the bridges were recorded anew
-Vegetables is a home studio recording for the first 2/3 of the song, but there's a splice into the April 14 "ballad insert" recording, and a splice into the original April verse as the fade, with a keyboard that was overdubbed at Sound Recorders on June 3.

All of these things can be considered at once, and we don't need to ignore what's on tape in order to make sense of what the band and others said at the time. We have these resources available.

and you can hear Jimmy Hilton slate Love to Say Da Da as "Love to Say Da Da."

I think you mean you can hear him slate it as "LOOVE to say DAH-DAH".

 

"Love to Say Da Da is Water" was an assumption made due to the similarities between that track and a later track about water. This got repeated for decades, because, to be honest, it made a lot of sense. But there is no evidence that this was the case, and we should not be repeating that assumption. A quick glance at a timeline of Brian's productions shows that the 2 songs were miles away from each other, and never conceived as even part of the same project, let alone the same song.

Liz, with all due respect, you have been posting mounds and mounds of misinformation, accumulated from decades of incorrect assumptions made about Smile before the resources were available. It's required consistent correcting, and when Will and I give information that may be new to you about what sections were recorded when, it comes from AFM contracts, tape boxes, Capitol files, content of actual tapes, and careful scrutiny in comparing all of the above. It isn't "revisionist history" to say Love to Say Da Da wasn't recorded as a section for The Elements, when piles of documentation confirm that's the case, and when that was only ever an assumption made by researchers in an attempt to make the album easier to understand. If the facts do not fit a narrative, it is not the facts that are revisionist and must change.

With respect, you and WilJC need to prove that my information is misinformation.  I won't just take your word for it. What documentation proves that Da Da wasn't in The Elements? As I have said already I have a track list produced before BWPS where Da Da is listed as Water.   And there is nothing remotely simple or easy to understand about the concept of Blue Hawaii where the rebirth cries like a child in Hawaiian in a chant about a prolonged, intense ritual.

I direct you to my earlier post in which I compiled all contemporary documentary references to a song called The Elements, and show that it no longer existed as a concept by the time Love to Say Da Da was written. But Love to Say Da Da is its own song, with its own title, recorded in several sections. I don't have any evidence that Good Vibrations wasn't recorded to be a section of You Still Believe In Me... but they are two different songs recorded at different sessions with their own distinct titles. You can hear Larry Levine slate The Elements (Part 1) as "The Elements (Part 1)" and you can hear Jimmy Hilton slate Love to Say Da Da as "Love to Say Da Da." Fanmix tracklists are not sources of Brian's original intentions, and neither are his new writings with Van in 2003.

I dated the recording by comparing the different handwritings on the front of the tape box, and comparing that to the engineers that were working at Columbia during each session of 1966. It was first determined to be recorded directly after the Worms vocals, but newer research shows that this happened about a week later, when that section happened to be removed to the same tape. They weren't recorded back to back as previously thought - just intentionally placed back to back on the same reel.

Observing that Love to Say Da Da and Cool Cool Water share the same exact chord progression, and that one is a rewrite of the other, is not "gaslighting Brian." It is a basic observation that can be made by anyone who has the ability recognize a chord pattern.

If you are listening to what's on the Smile Sessions disc 1, track 14, you are listening to Vegetables, not Vega-Tables. I again recommend that if you want to classify different recordings by different titles, you go by what Brian was using, or you confuse people. Those lyrics are different to what Brian had for Vega-Tables (which is track 23 on the same disc) but he was not asked by someone else to change them. It was just another Wilson/Parks rewrite.