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"The Flame" o*k*a  Chaplin & The Fataarses !?
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BRiAN WILSON WAS  "T*H*E  P*O*E*T  L*A*U*R*E*A*T*E  O*F  S*U*M*M*E*R"  !
Can anyone think of a better Brian epitaph?
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The Beach Boys/"Beach Men"(?) = 9 MEN:  Brian (rip), Dennis (rip), Carl (rip), Mike, Al, David, Bruce, Ricky & Blondie !   By  Dmitri A. Borgmann/PapaLaPap (2025:)
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   DO  NiNE  MEN  iNTERPRET  "NiNE  MEN" !?               i  NOD ! «   

Don Goldberg's autobio THE LOST SONG has some interesting sidelong glances at the Marilyn-Diane sister dynamic in the Sunflower-to-Carl & the Passions period. Whatever "triangle dynamic" that was going on did not seem to affect the closeness of the sisters. I think it's clear that Brian might have liked to be more like Dennis with respect to the opposite sex, but his introverted nature reined any such impulses to a large extent.

All of this feeds into the "family ties that bind" element of the band, an ongoing & shifting situation that was always being tested by Brian's need to escape its smothering aspect that threatened his ability to manage his own creativity. Diane clearly had a thing for Brian, and found a way to participate in his professional life--all of which didn't seem to bother Marilyn. (That clearly wasn't the case with other women, though: Marilyn clearly felt threatened by Debbie Keil's emotional connection with Brian.)

Clearly even the more intimate domestic elements inside the world of the Beach Boy axis had many layers and peregrinations...! 

This is a rehash of what I've said many times (to the point of pissing a lot of people off at me back then--sorry) but I'll post it here because, hey, it's relevant, I've been gone for like ten years so some people may not know my take and also for posterity. These are my strongly held opinions based on a preponderance of the evidence:

I'm probably repeating what I said back in that long 2022 thread, but I basically agree with you but have a few thoughts of my own to throw in. But to your four points:

1. I completely agree. I also personally think that the track list on the jackets Capital printed was the tracklist Brian was working with at least through January, and that Brian fully understood himself to be recording an album with those 12 tracks that would ultimately be pressed and distributed in those jackets. However, I've never seen any evidence from the period that suggested segregating each side by theme. I'd be very interested to be proven wrong on that. But I think it's just as likely that the two themes would have intertwined (sometimes within songs, even).

2. I completely agree that The Elements was going to be a single song with four separately recorded sections, although I think it's more likely Brian would have used hard cuts than cross fades, as was his style generally. But I think it's also worth considering that at some point Brian either considered or decided to have just fire + rebuilding instead. I also think, in my personal opinion and personal read of the surviving evidence as I understand it, that people, in general, are too quick to jump from "this wasn't finished" to "Brian couldn't figure out how to finish this." The way the sessions went suggests, to me, that Brian's (foolhardy) attempt to turn Heroes and Villains into a followup to Good Vibrations, beginning in early 1967, led him to stop work on the other tracks and focus almost entirely on a new single for the remainder of the sessions. My take is that Brian didn't fail to complete the Elements because he couldn't figure out how, but rather because he stopped trying to complete anything on the album other than Heroes and Villains (and briefly Vegetables, when that was imagined as the new single).

3. Completely agree with all of this!

4. This is an interesting theory, for sure. It feels intuitively plausible, to me. Although at risk of repeating myself, here too, I think that by early 1967 Brian was no longer recording in a way that really made a lot of sense if your goal was to finish an album, and that this, and not any particularly manifestation of the problem, was the key issue.

Thanks for keeping the Smile discussion alive!! I love it and always have

I'm also very interested in these questions! It's a bit of a universally elided topic, if understandably so. Re: question 2, I don't have my Beach Boys books and bios handy, so perhaps I'm off-base here, but I don't think I've ever seen any evidence that Brian's interest in Diane predated his marriage? I think his lyrics from the period, how quickly they seem to have moved, how young Marilyn was, all suggest that they didn't exactly have a super strong foundation for a marriage. And Brian at least seems to have had motivations a lot more complicated than just "we're in love and want to get married"... All of which is just to say, I'm not sure Diane had to do anything other than exist to become an obvious person on whom Brian could project a fantasy of an easier relationship (or easier life)...

Beach Boys Salute in L.A. Brings Three Generations of the Wilson Family Together With Friends for First Tribute Concert Since Brian’s Death

https://variety.com/2025/music/news/beach-boys-tribute-carnie-wilson-family-brian-concert-1236447640/

Great posts, Julia!

I'm a relative newbie of Smile material compared to most here, and always feel a bit lost in deep-in-the-weeds Smile discussions even as I genuinely find them fascinating. (Am finishing David Leaf's new book right now.) FWIW, what you say about the Elements suite makes a great deal of intuitive sense to me. Easy to see how a formless, unstructured suite might have overwhelmed Brian in concept and execution, versus e.g. four short punchy songs.

Thanks, I really appreciate it!

Hey, it's all good. You probably know as much as some of us here already since I think a lot of people (myself included) let their speculation and pet theories overtake hard scholarship and, in some cases, common sense. (There's nothing wrong with that to an extent and when it comes to analyzing the music as art, I wish more people around here would understand the term "death of the artist.") There's so much ambiguity and contradictory writing on this topic that in some ways the incomprehensible mess is part of its charm, I say.

I preordered a copy of Leaf's book on amazon, not sure how everyone else seems to have one already but no biggie, I'll get it when I get it. In the meantime, I've been amusing myself with the Internet Archive's copies of "WIBN: My Life as a Beach Boy" (which I know has been disowned but I suspect the pre-Landy years hold more truth than given credit for) and Keith Badman's "The Beach Boys" (https://archive.org/details/beachboysdefinit0000badm/page/147/mode/1up?view=theater). Someone on reddit shared pdf scans of "Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!" in case you need a copy of that too! (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pZS1VdKOBLKWUMGjCNiQ1HajSCec-Xpf). There are some in these parts who insist you read at least the Michael Vosse Fusion and Teen Set articles as well as the famous "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God" by Jules Siegal. I sometimes see David Anderle's Crawdaddy article held in the same regard, but he's a lot more general and in my personal opinion not quite as revelatory of a source. Vosse is by far the best, most comprehensive witness to what the sessions were like and how certain seemingly disparate pieces fit together (at least for a hot minute) in the crucial Nov-Dec '66 window when the album seemed its most perceptible.

GSHG: https://magazine.atavist.com/goodbye-surfing-hello-god/?no-overlay&preview






Here's some other random sources I happen to have in my collection:
https://people.carleton.edu/~aflory/Smile.pdf
https://imgur.com/7ERMbu5
https://www.goodhumorsmile.com/
https://www.angelfire.com/mn/smileshop/historylane.html
https://www.angelfire.com/mn/smileshop/historymott.html

Plus the internet archive has cached some of the legendary old Smile Shop website, this is a good starting point: http://web.archive.org/web/sitemap/http://www.thesmileshop.net//

Interview: Al Jardine of Beach Boys Talks Brian Wilson's Legacy, "Love You" Album, New EP & More


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoOWGpjMk8M

I think this title says it all: 'You need a mess of help to stand alone'. Brian was worried about his responsibility to his band who were family and friends. There was the record company. The departure of his collaborator. Difficulty in sequencing. And the knowledge that there was competition. These things all contributed.  Some have tried to play down the negative contribution of some band members. But some of that is on record.

Great post. Great stuff.

Random but sort-of-related question. Do we know anything concrete about Carl's level of support for the Smile material? (He is a pretty minimal presence in David Leaf's book, though some tensions are hinted at in the section about Brian's outside Brother Records projects.) Did he start out supportive of Brian/VDP in '66, but by '67 he was having doubts as well?

Great posts, Julia!

I'm a relative newbie of Smile material compared to most here, and always feel a bit lost in deep-in-the-weeds Smile discussions even as I genuinely find them fascinating. (Am finishing David Leaf's new book right now.) FWIW, what you say about the Elements suite makes a great deal of intuitive sense to me. Easy to see how a formless, unstructured suite might have overwhelmed Brian in concept and execution, versus e.g. four short punchy songs.