With Me Tonight

[Al Jardine: Pick Up Artist]

What is the story behind WMT? There are SO MANY versions and sessions, some sound similar but are obviously different.

We have...

Smiley WMT

TSS Box WMT

Secret Smile Boot: Slow Session, Fast Session, Fast Stereo Mix

Hawthorne, CA WMT

Dumb Angel WMT with it sung over veggies

Heroes piano piece called WMT, on the H&V Sessions boot

WTF was going on with all this WMT?

[Dunderhead]

I think Brian is just an obsessive compulsive, and I really see his re-recordings and re-re-recordings as being a symptom of that underlying mental illness.

I also think that part of the deal with WMT is just a deficiency in how we view Smile as a whole. We're all sort of locked in at this point into thinking about everything in terms of suites or movements, but I can't help get the impression that a finished December 1966 Smile would have just been an extended 30-minute medley.

[Ron]

I can't comment on the story behind it, because I don't know.

I always found it a really revealing look into Brian's passive agressive nature, though.

Smile - Overproduced, over the top, masterful use of the studio.  Approached the limits of what could be done in a studio at the time, and was layered so deeply that Brian never even completely pulled the project off.    Apparently he faced resistance on the vast vision of his project, especially later in the sessions... famously from Mike, but also from the Label and who knows who else.  

"With Me Tonight" - The complete opposite.  Almost no music (I think it just has an organ, right?)  Beautiful harmonies, but simple harmonies (It has more of a 4 Seasons sound, everybody's singing the same lines, instead of Brian's typical 3 or 4 things going on at the same time type harmony).   It has what, a dozen words to the lyrics?  With me Tonight, I know you're with me tonight.  On and on she goes Dum be doo.  For Sure you're with me tonight.  


It's like Brian passive-agressively telling the doubters in his life that if they didnt' believe in his projects, then fine, here's a song with hardly anything in it.  

[Dunderhead]

I can't comment on the story behind it, because I don't know.

I always found it a really revealing look into Brian's passive agressive nature, though.

Smile - Overproduced, over the top, masterful use of the studio.  Approached the limits of what could be done in a studio at the time, and was layered so deeply that Brian never even completely pulled the project off.    Apparently he faced resistance on the vast vision of his project, especially later in the sessions... famously from Mike, but also from the Label and who knows who else.  

"With Me Tonight" - The complete opposite.  Almost no music (I think it just has an organ, right?)  Beautiful harmonies, but simple harmonies (It has more of a 4 Seasons sound, everybody's singing the same lines, instead of Brian's typical 3 or 4 things going on at the same time type harmony).   It has what, a dozen words to the lyrics?  With me Tonight, I know you're with me tonight.  On and on she goes Dum be doo.  For Sure you're with me tonight.  


It's like Brian passive-agressively telling the doubters in his life that if they didnt' believe in his projects, then fine, here's a song with hardly anything in it.  

I used to put a lot more stock in the passive aggressive version of the story. And while that may certainly be part of things, I don't know if I believe so much in it anymore. It may have partially been passive aggressive, but I think that Brian was more being passive aggressive with himself actually, and not the rest of the band or his audience. He wanted to sabotage the band because it was an extension of himself. He decided to put out music that would fail instead of taking the risk that his "real" music would disappoint.
He's a complicated guy, that's for sure. But I think we can all understand where he was coming from.

[Ron]

Maybe it was aimed at himself.  I think we can all agree either way that it was probably purposefully designed as a contrast to the music he had been obsessing over. 

As for the sabotage thing, I think the reworked "Wind Chimes" and "Wonderful" versions on SS definately back that up.  I feel that he purposefully crippled those songs since he didn't get to release them the way he originally intended. 

[Don Malcolm]

It seems as though WMT was "cut back" from something more elaborate, at least vocally, in terms of how it ultimately appeared on Smiley. To me, it sounds like a piece that BW might have used in a more ornate version of one of the more prominent songs ("H & V", "Vegetables") but fell back to being a separate track after it was decided to abandon the notion of an interlocking suite and focus on making separate tracks.

[Dunderhead]

I think it just represents the failure of the Spector formula, that's the reason why Brian had to record Smiley Smile.
One of Brian's greatest talents was in sound painting. I don't know if everyone is the same way, but I hear different instruments and timbres as colors. Spector's music always sounded very red or pink to me, Brian's was always more green, or blue or purple. With Smile Brian had to branch out from the orchestral formula used by Spector, he needed to expand his palette in order for the color of each song's production would match the lyrical content. This lead Brian to really break out of the 20 musician formula that he had learned from Spector, he started using instruments that Spector never thought to use, and he started getting much more expressive and controlled playing out of his musicians. This afforded him with substantially greater control over the actual orchestral flavor of a recording, but it came at a price. Because he had become more efficient, he was able to use fewer instruments, say 4 instead of 20. But those 16 players were the thing that allowed the 'wall of sound' to hit its critical mass.
Essentially Brian had lost the volume and presence that he had gotten using the more Spector-ish formula. So he was trapped in a vicious circle, more formulaic orchestration, or less wall of sound.
Smiley Smile is the end result of that tension, and it's obvious Brian resolved things by opting for the latter of his two choices. He could have finished Smile, but it would have sounded more like Pet Sounds than what he had originally envisioned.

That's what Smiley-Wild Honey-Friends is all about to me, Brian finding a middle path that he was satisfied with. A way to get the full rich wall of sound experience, without sacrificing the idiosyncrasies of his orchestration.

I think this is exactly why Brian was never satisfied with Smile, and why he struck out on such a, at first glance, radically different path from what he had been doing. He was correcting the flaw of Spector's formula.   

[The Shift]

As for the sabotage thing, I think the reworked "Wind Chimes" and "Wonderful" versions on SS definately back that up.  I feel that he purposefully crippled those songs since he didn't get to release them the way he originally intended. 

Can't hold with that - if it was a slash and burn campaign, why did he create utterly different but similarly beautiful versions? Crippled 'em? Not in my book…

[PS]

I much prefer Smiley's Wind Chimes and Wonderful  - both mysteriously beautiful and breathlessly intimate, with the gothically eerie musical beds perfectly matching the lyrics and mood. The Smile version of Wind Chimes is much too light and relatively monotonous (and I hate the bombastic break and the rest of the instrumental part) and Wonderful is stately, but not nearly as moving and tender (and I never cared for the sour horn notes, frankly). I remember being rather underwhelmed and disaffected by these when the first Smile boots began to appear, after loving the Smiley versions for so many years. These two jewels, along with Little Pad, are Smiley's capstone pieces (outside of the singles) for me.

[puni puni]

What is the story behind WMT?

It's a song built around a common jazz riff played on bass while an organ bounces between A and E major chords.

[Don Malcolm]

I think it just represents the failure of the Spector formula, that's the reason why Brian had to record Smiley Smile.
One of Brian's greatest talents was in sound painting. I don't know if everyone is the same way, but I hear different instruments and timbres as colors. Spector's music always sounded very red or pink to me, Brian's was always more green, or blue or purple. With Smile Brian had to branch out from the orchestral formula used by Spector, he needed to expand his palette in order for the color of each song's production would match the lyrical content. This lead Brian to really break out of the 20 musician formula that he had learned from Spector, he started using instruments that Spector never thought to use, and he started getting much more expressive and controlled playing out of his musicians. This afforded him with substantially greater control over the actual orchestral flavor of a recording, but it came at a price. Because he had become more efficient, he was able to use fewer instruments, say 4 instead of 20. But those 16 players were the thing that allowed the 'wall of sound' to hit its critical mass.
Essentially Brian had lost the volume and presence that he had gotten using the more Spector-ish formula. So he was trapped in a vicious circle, more formulaic orchestration, or less wall of sound.
Smiley Smile is the end result of that tension, and it's obvious Brian resolved things by opting for the latter of his two choices. He could have finished Smile, but it would have sounded more like Pet Sounds than what he had originally envisioned.

That's what Smiley-Wild Honey-Friends is all about to me, Brian finding a middle path that he was satisfied with. A way to get the full rich wall of sound experience, without sacrificing the idiosyncrasies of his orchestration.

I think this is exactly why Brian was never satisfied with Smile, and why he struck out on such a, at first glance, radically different path from what he had been doing. He was correcting the flaw of Spector's formula.   

An extremely interesting perspective. Spector's musical sources were clustered around Brill Building pop, particularly the strain that would morph into blue-eyed soul. Wedding that to "the wall" was saturation, overkill, but the voices/vocal arrangements were if anything more formulaic than the "wall" itself. (Only Tina Turner was able to "defeat" the wall, being a truly primal soul singer.)

Brian already had his own "wall"--which was the band's vocal blend. It, too, was formulaic at first--but Brian kept experimenting with it, giving it a wider range of tonal color, a more encompassing range of timbres, and the flexibility to be both powerful and intricate simultaneously.

Once Brian was in the thrall of Spector, he really had two "walls", and he began exploiting that with a vengeance around the time of Today. '65 is when he moved past Spector's wall into a realm of synthesis all his own. As you say, that became more sophisticated and the instrumentation became much more individually expressive with Pet Sounds. And I think it's exactly right that a portion of the Smile material began to clash with that approach, even with the successful arrangement innovations and mind-blowing sounds in the backing tracks of "Cabinessence" and "Surf's Up" (first movement). It's actually "Surf's Up" that points to the dilemma, which is that "chamber music" is not compatible with symphonies (pocket or otherwise).

Trying to synthesize "Heroes & Villains" into a chamber symphony seems to have been the killing blow for Smile in '67. The competing impulses between chamber music and symphony were all resolved in the direction of a capella intimacy for Smiley Smile. Once he had that Baldwin organ, he could take a stand and make entirely different genres of Beach Boy music built around it--and the remaining "wall" he still had at his disposal.--the voices in the band.  And that's what he did, with great success but slowly decreasing frequency, over the next four years, until he hit a third wall--the wall of depression, auditory hallucination, and drug abuse.

[runnersdialzero]

I wish I could remember where I heard the rehearsal version where Brian is singing in this totally exaggerated, over the top falsetto, as it's pretty darn funny. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

[Generation42]

I think it just represents the failure of the Spector formula, that's the reason why Brian had to record Smiley Smile.
One of Brian's greatest talents was in sound painting. I don't know if everyone is the same way, but I hear different instruments and timbres as colors. Spector's music always sounded very red or pink to me, Brian's was always more green, or blue or purple. With Smile Brian had to branch out from the orchestral formula used by Spector, he needed to expand his palette in order for the color of each song's production would match the lyrical content. This lead Brian to really break out of the 20 musician formula that he had learned from Spector, he started using instruments that Spector never thought to use, and he started getting much more expressive and controlled playing out of his musicians. This afforded him with substantially greater control over the actual orchestral flavor of a recording, but it came at a price. Because he had become more efficient, he was able to use fewer instruments, say 4 instead of 20. But those 16 players were the thing that allowed the 'wall of sound' to hit its critical mass.
Essentially Brian had lost the volume and presence that he had gotten using the more Spector-ish formula. So he was trapped in a vicious circle, more formulaic orchestration, or less wall of sound.
Smiley Smile is the end result of that tension, and it's obvious Brian resolved things by opting for the latter of his two choices. He could have finished Smile, but it would have sounded more like Pet Sounds than what he had originally envisioned.

That's what Smiley-Wild Honey-Friends is all about to me, Brian finding a middle path that he was satisfied with. A way to get the full rich wall of sound experience, without sacrificing the idiosyncrasies of his orchestration.

I think this is exactly why Brian was never satisfied with Smile, and why he struck out on such a, at first glance, radically different path from what he had been doing. He was correcting the flaw of Spector's formula.   

An extremely interesting perspective. Spector's musical sources were clustered around Brill Building pop, particularly the strain that would morph into blue-eyed soul. Wedding that to "the wall" was saturation, overkill, but the voices/vocal arrangements were if anything more formulaic than the "wall" itself. (Only Tina Turner was able to "defeat" the wall, being a truly primal soul singer.)

Brian already had his own "wall"--which was the band's vocal blend. It, too, was formulaic at first--but Brian kept experimenting with it, giving it a wider range of tonal color, a more encompassing range of timbres, and the flexibility to be both powerful and intricate simultaneously.

Once Brian was in the thrall of Spector, he really had two "walls", and he began exploiting that with a vengeance around the time of Today. '65 is when he moved past Spector's wall into a realm of synthesis all his own. As you say, that became more sophisticated and the instrumentation became much more individually expressive with Pet Sounds. And I think it's exactly right that a portion of the Smile material began to clash with that approach, even with the successful arrangement innovations and mind-blowing sounds in the backing tracks of "Cabinessence" and "Surf's Up" (first movement). It's actually "Surf's Up" that points to the dilemma, which is that "chamber music" is not compatible with symphonies (pocket or otherwise).

Trying to synthesize "Heroes & Villains" into a chamber symphony seems to have been the killing blow for Smile in '67. The competing impulses between chamber music and symphony were all resolved in the direction of a capella intimacy for Smiley Smile. Once he had that Baldwin organ, he could take a stand and make entirely different genres of Beach Boy music built around it--and the remaining "wall" he still had at his disposal.--the voices in the band.  And that's what he did, with great success but slowly decreasing frequency, over the next four years, until he hit a third wall--the wall of depression, auditory hallucination, and drug abuse.

Wonderful couple of posts, here.  I don't know that I agree fully with the unworkability of a chamber symphony (at least in theory), but I really enjoyed these posts.

[Dunderhead]

I didn't think of the vocal element Don, but you're completely right. One of the great things about Smile is control shown on all the background harmonies. I think the vocals on DYLW for example are just amazing. They really are very expressive. I think Brian wanted to make that wall of sound bigger.
When you listen to H&V he's only using a handful of instruments. The bedrock of that song is drums, 2 basses, and a rhythm guitar. In order to get the rustic wild west feeling for the song, he found himself only needing just a few players, so he he had to fill out the rest of the mix with just vocals. But in mono it never really sounds right like that, the vocals blend so well already that the amount of echo he needed on the instruments overwhelms them.

If you watch the Desper video, you can see that stereo added a lot, it allowed different elements to remain distinct, it essentially created different levels of the wall. And that's what Brian needed on Smile, but for so many of the frequently discussed reasons, stereo always remained out of the question.

I think Time To Get Alone is Brian's mature, post-Smile style. The instrumentation is very minimal and expressive, the bass and piano combination, drums, some type of bright keyboard - harpsichord, or the roxichord maybe, - and a few secondary instruments like vibes and strings. But there's a lot of depth in there, and the vocals work on so many different blended levels. Spector's wall was more of this crashing tide, coming at the listener with a concentrated and destructive power. Time To Get Alone is more like a river, where the vocals flow like water across a relief stricken rock bed.

[Dunderhead]

Listening to the TTGA backing track right now,
does anyone know exactly what's in there?

There's the piano and bass in the left channel, in the right channel it sounds like the piano is mixed with some other electronic keyboard. It's a really distinctive figure. In the chorus it sounds like some other instrument joins in, it doesn't sound like a real horn to me, but that may be the recording. Is it a Chamberlin? I can't really tell.
It's a really outrageously brilliant track.