i find it hard to believe that a lot of the singing melodies in 2004 are completely new.[

I don't think there's much to suggest that they are not new (except for DYLW) - especially since the melodies are so drastically different from the ones in 66.

 and i just can't listen to "holidays" and ever think there's not supposed to be singing over it.  it's weak as an instrumental by brian's standards i think.  oh well. 

Well, yeah. I think instrumentally the song is weak compared to the basic music tracks of other songs from that era.

Count me among those who think that Holidays sounds the most like an instrumental.  Good melodies in the intro, and in the verses, and in the xylophone outro.  Obviously no one knows, but it just feels the most like an instrumental to me.

why is this nobody knows??  Brian knows, van dyke know.  I don't see any reason why he would add lyrics if it was supposed to be an instrumental.  And don't tell me that he wouldn't remember. I doubt he's listened to "summer means new love" lately, but he definitely knows it's an instrumental.  

Sorry but this is incorrect - the decisions that were made for BWPS were made during that immediate time period not in 1966. One of the decisions made was that there would be vocals on every single track and lyrics for everything, even the Water Chant. To be honest, Holidays may not have even been a track on Smile at all, let alone a song with lyrics.

Brian couldn't recall that he had already recorded and released White Christmas. Why would he remember if a song he wrote a few years later and then shelved for over 35 years (probably without being listened to) was meant to have lyrics?

Cabinessence does the same thing with an instrument playing the vocal melody. 

Only on the "welcomes a time for a change" part. That's hardly the same thing.

The final harmonies in GV correspond, sorta, with the instrumental chorus in 'Song For Children' The na-na-na-na, na-na-naaa riff?

Exactly.

Look, Holidays, Dada and Worms/RPR have a backing track sound to them.  They have no melody for long stretches, where a lead vocal would reside, plainly showing they were meant to have lyrics. 

Like I said, I hear a pretty strong melodic line throughout Holidays. It's so strong, in fact, that Brian merely replicates it for his vocal line in the 2004 version.

Look too me sounds more unfinished but it also sounds like something left over from Good Vibrations so I'm not sure on the role it would have played on Smile.

Holiday (version 1966) sounds pretty complete to me, but I don't think that it was necessarily considered to be an album track. It seems sort of like the Trombone Dixie of the early tracks. And while I do like the 2004 version with lyrics, I should say that it's a bit unsatisfying that Brian is simply singing over the horn melody that's already in the song. This wasn't really a common trait for Beach Boys songs (at least not off the top of my head).

Of the 12-song Capitol list, only one track (The Elements) looked like it was heading in the "instrumental" category, which is typically on par with a lot of Beach Boys album (save for Surfin' USA).

There has been a lot of talk on this board lately about whether Our Prayer should come first or last on Smile, but no one is arguing that it should come second last because, well, that's kind of ridiculous.

Why is that ridiculous? My old fanboy SMiLE mixes had Prayer second last and Good Vibrations last. Or do you mean arguing about it is ridiculous?

Fair enough. It's still ridiculous.

That's some attitude you have there. Pretty much self-indulgent. I can't take YOU seriously. (If that is grammatically correct - or is it "take somebody serious"?)

Ouch. Of course, you can program your mix however you want.

But seriously, track listings on albums (good albums, at least) typically have a certain kind of logic to them. There's a reason, for example, why Revolver begins with Taxman and ends with Tomorrow Never Knows. And, it doesn't take much to conclude that "Our Prayer" how no logical place in the Smile tracklisting anywhere other than on top or on bottom. And, this logic is reinforced by the fact that we have crucial figures (Brian Wilson and Michael Vosse) who suggest that the track falls into those slots.

Bruce's attitude towards Smile has always bothered me. He seems even more patronizing than Mike about the music.

Elementals.

There has been a lot of talk on this board lately about whether Our Prayer should come first or last on Smile, but no one is arguing that it should come second last because, well, that's kind of ridiculous.

Why is that ridiculous? My old fanboy SMiLE mixes had Prayer second last and Good Vibrations last. Or do you mean arguing about it is ridiculous?

Fair enough. It's still ridiculous.

Sorry Bill, although I'm no prude and I do think a natural (Mushrooms) psychedelic experience can be beneficial, saying that LSD challenged the status quo when in fact it was developed by and distributed through the military intelligence community to do the exact opposite (confuse and sedate the uppity student protesters) makes you look kinda naive.

You're conveniently leaving out a crucial part. There's a reason why LSD went from being legal to illegal. If the only function of LSD was to "confuse and sedate uppity student protesters" and serve the interests of the "intelligence community" then it would have never been made illegal. What happened though is that the "military intelligence community" who were testing the drug for how well it controlled the population discovered that it was doing the opposite - that, in fact, they were losing control of the country and that a very vibrant counterculture was growing because of it, and that this counterculture actually had access to major media outlets.

The whole we-took-drugs-and stopped-a-war meme that survives from the sixties is a proven lie, and I've never understood how musicians on major labels (mainstream media) who made tons of money while there songs played on countless radio stations (also mainstream media) was in any way challenging to the status quo.

Well, it is outright impossible to deny that the "status quo" changed between 1960 and 1970. Something happened. I might agree that drugs didn't change the status quo but something did and I would say that the growing counterculture was part of that.

Yeah, well, Brian could have put anything the hell he wanted on the album and called all the shots if he'd stepped up, right? Since he didn't, can you blame the other Boys for putting their own stuff on it?

Eh, well, I don't really think "the other Boys" made the noblest of decisions from 1966 onwards. But selfishly I do love the music.

First, I was agreeing with you, you said it.

Yes, but after reading your response, I felt the need to qualify my remarks. Again, there is nothing wrong with an album that is just a collection of songs, but I wouldn't rate them as high as albums that have cohesive structure. But mostly we're talking about two different entities.

Second, every song doesn't have to be a masterpiece.

Of course not, but the best albums have a generally solid consistency but typically in order for that to happen, the album has to have some sort of cohesion.

Third, All I Want To Do, lackluster? It's the most rocking song on the album.

Lackluster is not the same thing as slow. All I Want To Do is, for me, one of the most boring songs in The Beach Boys catalogue because it is so transparent in what it is trying to achieve and it does it in the most mediocre way imaginable. I think there is a good reason why Dennis typically kept to mellow, ballads, and funkiness -- he couldn't write rock, and this song is probably the best evidence for that. The music is just too by-the-numbers but it may have been helped if Mike Love wasn't singing it (his voice is perfect for some songs -- this ain't it), and if the lyrics weren't as trite. Oooh, a guy wants to have sex - how badass. Maybe if there wasn't a rich history of rock and roll saying the same thing in a much more subtle way for 15 years before this, it may have been interesting.

Fourth, before or after 1967, what is the difference?

Enormous. Again, to use my previous example, if a movie came out today and quite seriously tried to get away with 1950s special effects, it would be laughed out of existence, and quite rightly so. But, of course, that doesn't mean we write off movies from the 50s. Different times demand different a different criteria of evaluation. You can't criticize, say, Marvin Gaye for not making cohesive albums before What's Going On but you can criticize him for not making one after it.

It is what it is. It wasn't released to be a concept album.

Again, I have not ONCE mentioned anything about concept albums whatsoever.

As for cohesive, I've been listening to this for 41 years and it doesn't bother me listening to it from beginning to end. Let It Be? I thought you said everything was cohesive after 1967?

If you thought I said that, then you didn't understand what I wrote.

Oy! The Beatles made a non-cohesive album? They're not perfect after all.

Quite right. Let it Be is nowhere near as strong as anything they made post-Help.
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One of the first things, along with "Walk on By" and "We're Together Again". As for the origin of "Do it Again", that is so well documented, and has been for decades (hell, even Wikipedia gets it right !), that I'm forced to side with the poster who questioned if you were a fan of the band at all. Serious query: how many BB books have you got or read ?

Pure charm.

Do It Again has its charm, I think - though as 20/20 tracks go, I would put I Can Hear Music, Time To Get Alone, Be With Me, I Went to Sleep, Our Prayer, and Cabin Essence ahead of it. That being said, Brian was still interested in making commercial records (in fact, I'm not sure if there was ever a time where that wasn't a desire on his part) and I can't begrudge him for doing it here.

I'm not quite sure on your point about it being the beginning of the end. It was just obviously 'the single' for the album.

Speculation what that other 10 tracks beside GV + HV were and if Brian really wrote them all in collaboration with Van Dyke Parks. I mean, "Prayer" was wordless and "Holidays" for example didn't have lyrics.

Well, I don't think he necessarily means exactly what he says. He could have easily said of Pet Sounds, that "I wrote all the songs with Tony Asher" when several of the songs weren't written by Asher at all. I think he may be talking in short hand.

That being said, I think there's every reason to believe that the 12 songs he refers to here are probably the same 12 songs that are on the Capitol list, and nine of them would have been credited to VDP, which makes one more track than what Asher is credited for on PS.

Paul McCartney has been quoted as saying that before Sgt. Pepper even the Beatles popularity was on the wane. Many contemporary publications were thinking the Beatles were washed up by early 1967.

Wellll....I think what Macca meant was that the critics were jumping on the fact that the band's productivity appeared to be way down from its 1964-65 period, which was true. It was eight months between Rubber Soul and Revolver and then six months before the world got a new Beatles single, and a full ten months between Revolver and Pepper. Meanwhile during this time, the boys seemed to be going separate ways, with Lennon doing a film and Harrison being off in India, etc. From an outsiders perspective, I suppose, it did look like the well was running dry. But I don't think that quite leads us to assume that their popularity was subsiding (except, perhaps, in the fundamentalist pockets of the US of A).

You're correct. There's nothing wrong with an album full of good songs. Nothing is wrong with 20/20.

Well, that's not true. Bluebirds Over The Mountain, The Nearest Far Away Place, and All I Want to Do are pretty lacklustre. Add to that the fact that Our Prayer and Cabin Essence sound completely out of place and you have a blatantly jarring and patchy album.

There were tons of albums released in much the same way.

Yep, though most of them were before 1967, and that's because the album as a form wasn't widely understood to be a unifying framework.

So, there was nothing wrong with them, but it is difficult to evaluate those albums with the same criteria that you evaluate the later ones. It's like comparing the special effects of movies made today with movies made in the 1950s.

Not every album was a concept album.

There is an enormous difference between an album that is cohesive and a concept album. Pet Sounds is cohesive but there's no overarching concept. Every Beatles album from Rubber Soul onwards is cohesive (save Let it Be) but there's only one concept album amongst them (and even that is really pushing the limits of what we today call a concept album).

20/20 to me, is like The Beach Boys' Magical Mystery Tour. There are lots of great songs but it just doesn't feel like an official album. And, at least, with MMT, all the songs were recorded within the same general time frame.

Part of the problem, of course, is cohesion. There has been a lot of talk on this board lately about whether Our Prayer should come first or last on Smile, but no one is arguing that it should come second last because, well, that's kind of ridiculous.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with an album that's just a collection of good songs, but I have a difficult time thinking of it as a great album if it doesn't have a cohesive structure.

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Ebb and Flow your theory would make sense if Good Vibrations didn't come out a year later and decimate everything out at the time.  It was like HIROSHIMA, you think people didn't like that?  merda.  Play Good Vibrations for anybody, then play any Beatles song for anybody, and see which one 'the public' is into these days.  Any Beatles song before 1966 falls at the feet of Good Vibrations, and you can bet the public felt that way then too.  

I never said anything about Good Vibrations or anything post 1965.  I'm just speculating about why they lost steam with the public without blaming it completely on Smile, which seems to be an unpopular viewpoint.  Oh well.

No, I absolutely agree with your point that there were other factors for The Beach Boys losing steam with the public. But I am not convinced by your reasoning. After all the period from April 1965 to October 1966 is both their critical and commercial peak. During this time the band had five songs in the top 5, including two #1s and one #2. Summer Days tied with Surfin' USA as the highest charting Beach Boys album to date, while Party! was about on par with other albums (it ranked higher than Surfer Girl and as high as the Christmas album). Plus, Pet Sounds sold modestly, but received a good amount of critical attention - thanks in part to the Derek Taylor machine that propagated the "Brian is a genius" motto.

Does Rubber Soul sound more advanced than Party!? Yes. But in December 1965, The Beatles and Bob Dylan were in a different sphere than anyone musically. This was, after all, the year when "Wooly Bully" and "Hang on Sloopy" came out and even then we're still a long ways away from The Monkees who debut more than halfway through 1966.

I think that rock and roll history has done a poor job at putting these things in perspective, to be honest and as a result, while people can talk a big game about Sgt. Pepper being revolutionary, nobody knows just how out-of-left field, Rubber Soul, Highway 61, and Pet Sounds really were.

Remember too that this was more than a year or so before the great rise of music critics that occurred a year later who justified their existence by creating "hot or not" categories. But in 1965, rock and roll was rock and roll, and while most understood that The Beatles were at the top of the heap, there just wasn't a vocabulary yet about being "with the times" or "behind the times" that really began post-Pepper (unless, of course, you were really into Sinatra, man).

Also, had Smile come out, it is difficult to say how it would have affected The Beach Boys career, commercially. It could have been a big hit, particularly if it came out in January 67, as planned, only a few short months after their most massive hit yet. That could have put the album in a higher chart position than Pet Sounds. That being said, there really wasn't a strong contender for a second single from the album, which I think Brian himself recognized, hence the obsessive tinkering with Heroes and Villains. For that reason alone, coupled with the far-out nature of the music (a few months before The Beatles made such a thing hip) could have put it into the teens.

So why did the Beach Boys lose steam with the public? Smiley Smile couldn't have helped. It was just too strange. Sgt. Pepper was, of course, experimental, but it was also full of hooks and big splashy sing-a-long choruses (Lucy in the Sky, anyone?). Furthermore, it hit on precisely the expression of the counterculture. Smiley Smile on the other hand, was the countercultural folk who took things too far - the conspiracy theorist in the gang who makes all the other countercultural folks feel uncomfortable (personal note: I do like Smiley Smile as an album and conspiracy theorists do make me uncomfortable).

After that, it was a downward spiral. Rock journalists were telling the public at large what was cool and what wasn't by largely drawing an arbitrary line in the sand, and in the US at least post-Summer 67, you couldn't be cool and be a Beach Boys fan anymore.

I would say these factors were a bit more significant.

I support Buddahat!

It's particularly enjoyable to re-think The Beach Boys post-Smiley Smile output. The reason, I think, is because they had a lot of material that was repeatedly negotiated, omitted, etc. and there could have been endless variations of albums from that time period. An album like Sunflower, for example, had an entirely different lineup but The Beach Boys changed it dramatically for commercial reasons yet it nevertheless charted lower than any other Beach Boys album at that point. There is an ongoing tendency to wonder what could have been, especially since I think it pains some Beach Boys fans to consider that despite the fact that this period was so creative, it was also the period where everything seemed to go wrong.

Given Brian's mental state, I think that he was heading towards some kind of breakdown which would have occurred with or without Smile. Nevertheless, I think the fact that Brian was forced into a position where he had to kill the project probably didn't do him much good. As an abundantly insecure man, I think it made him seriously re-consider his own self-worth as an artist and this combined with his illness led him pull back from the things he once felt responsible for. Maybe if Wild Honey or Friends (which, from Brian's point of view, were probably compromises) had been as successful as Today! or Summer Days, then he might have been able to rebuild some of his confidence but unfortunately that wasn't in the cards. I think what ultimately would have saved Brian is recognizing that his idea of perfection was unattainable for anyone, and to put Smile out to what surely would have been enormous critical acclaim, though doing so before Sgt. Pepper rather than after it would have probably been key to this as well.

I'm very hazy on this SU Part 1, 2, 3 thing.

In my mind, Part 1 was the instrumental intro we all heart on the first VIGOTONE Smile boot.  No vocals, just the 'stormy horns' ,  plucking strings, etc.

Part 2 was the Brian vocal.

Part 3 was added later - the CITFOM part Brian finally added years later on the Carl version.

Is there evidence of something different?

it's been theorised for decades that, as the track for the first section is logged as "Part 1", there must be an equally ornate "Part 2", despite the absence of any documentation. At least two fans have claimed to have heard of this "Part 2" from someone who's heard it. Maybe the box will resolve this, maybe it won't, but this I will predict: if you think the conjecture thus far has been bad enough, what's going to explode once we actually get a tracklisting to pick over is almost unimaginable.

This is fairly unusual as far as the SMiLE recordings go. All of the other major songs had full backing tracks recorded (as far as we can tell), but "Surf's Up" only has a backing track for the first two verses. Reportedly, when Darian asked Brian in '03 what the backing track was supposed to be for the middle section of the song, Brian replied something to the effect of "There would have been a string arrangement on there". Now was this just in Brian's head or was something like this actually recorded in '66/'67? It appears that the band did not have access to any such session in '71 when the track was finally completed, so I doubt the "Part 2" was ever recorded (or, perhaps, Brian junked it shortly after recording). As it stands, I think Paul Mertens' string arrangement on the BWPS version is a very nice addition.

I've said this elsewhere but I will repeat it here. It is absurdly unusual that Brian didn't record music to the "Dove nested towers" section of Surf's Up (I'm calling it that because there seems to be a lot of confusion that comes up by calling it Surf's Up Pt. 2). This was a particularly creative period for Brian - part of what stalled Smile initially, I think, is that there were too many ideas for it, which is bound to happen when you want to achieve an unattainable perfection (and, this, ultimately is what I believe led to the big downfall of the album). Furthermore, it seems that by this time, Brian had a pretty good idea of what the final product would sound like when he wrote the song. If you listen to that "demo" of H&V/IIGS/Barnyard, he seems totally on top of what those songs would sound like (right down to THE ANIMALS!). Of course, I have nothing to say that such a recording exists, it is so strange that it borders on impossible that it doesn't.

I grew up with The Beatles in the backgound. Have to say, they never really did it for me in the way they do for a lot of people: in one sense they are far and away the most over-rated band ever. Now hate me. 

No hate. But I feel like that's an easier thing to say in retrospect than it would have been when they were taking the world by storm (unless one was the type who believed that it could never get any better than jazz or classical).

The Beatles are my favourite band, followed by The Beach Boys.

Followed by The Kinks if that helps.

Or Denny's legendary piano demo of Child is Father of the Man, as mentioned in LLVS...

I got a sneak preview of one of the tracks the previous night when Dennis played me a piano version of one track, 'Child Of The Man', a cowboy song, and then gave me the throwaway line of the year-'And this is a prayer I'm working on for it!!'

Just so you know I intend to contribute to this thread the more I work out the list in my head (I've got a Microsoft Word doc on it in the meantime where I'm juggling around pieces).

I would like to add here though that Child is Father of the Man is one of the biggest puzzlers of this album. Surely there are lyrics that were written for it - the title smacks of Parks (the allusion to Wordsworth), it has a structure that blatantly appears to require lead vocals, and it appeared to come very early on in the Smile process before things got messy. And yet there is not a single trace of the lyrics apart from the title! You would think that someone would have at least retained a copy of the lyrics. The Frank Holmes artwork that gave us the original lyrics for Do You Like Worms, how come it doesn't exist for this song?

The song seems to be the one major piece that has slipped through the grid, so to speak.

Also, it's been years since I read the Siegel piece, but is it possible when Denny sings the cowboy song called "Child of the Man" (rather than Child is Father of the Man) that he isn't singing: "My children were raised you know they suddenly rised, they started slow long ago, head to toe, healthy wealthy and wise".  Or would Siegel know that was "Heroes and Villains". I realize, of course, that would be a huge coincidence.