SMiLE Theory #9.4556,9805,5876

[phirnis]

Mexican Girl is silly but Thomas couldn't produce anything near even that.

Of course it would have been much worse, imagine Surf's Up being drenched in Thomas' trademark adult contemporary sound and all parties involved talking about how they brought a modern touch to that 60s material...

[MBE]

Mexican Girl is silly but Thomas couldn't produce anything near even that.

Of course it would have been much worse, imagine Surf's Up being drenched in Thomas' trademark adult contemporary sound and all parties involved talking about how they brought a modern touch to that 60s material...

Exactly or how about Wonderful with a power ballad solo.

[phirnis]

Mexican Girl is silly but Thomas couldn't produce anything near even that.

Of course it would have been much worse, imagine Surf's Up being drenched in Thomas' trademark adult contemporary sound and all parties involved talking about how they brought a modern touch to that 60s material...

Exactly or how about Wonderful with a power ballad solo.

Not to mention the spine-chilling Cabinessence sax solo...

[Bicyclerider]

Depends on what you mean by "ego".

Smile captured a transcendent feeling - think of the "Over and over..." part of Cabinessence. Eternally cycling pieces that really have no beginning and no end in their structure.


In my eyes this was Brian's biggest problem in completing Smile - how to capture this feeling without limiting it by conventional song structures. I could listen to the chorus of Child Is Father To The Man for the rest of my life, I don't need a change. It's perfection as it is. But how do you get that on record? It has to end somewhere, has to become something else. But the becoming aspect was not in Brian's head while writing or conceiving the album. Those feels, fragments, and pieces celebrate BEING. Brian wrote them as living feels capturing his state of mind and they probably filled his living room with sound for hours. Just filling the space like air.

Good observations.  Brian was definitely trying to write "outside the box" as Van Dyke has put it - to discard conventional song structure when it suited him, to go for feels.  But he also wrote Pet Sounds by first playing "feels" and fragments on the piano, but then structuring those feels into complete songs.  For Smile, those feels would stay fragments, which he would want to incorporate into Heroes, or Vegetables, or another song - and then the song structures would remain fluid and subject to Brian's creative whims a week or two later and a fragment would be replaced or discarded.  Since for Brian immediacy was important, once the immediacy was gone finishing anything became more and more problematic.

I think the "sectional" approach for that reason was a significant factor in the abandonment of the Smile album.  He almost didn't finish Good Vibrations, which he struggled with for similar reasons - dissatisfaction with a section, repeatedly rerecording sections with different instrumentation and arrangements.

[adamghost]

There's been an idea that people have gotten to the edges of a few times in talking about SMiLE that has struck me every time.  So you know, I'm speaking here as a guy who's just finishing up a double album that originally was supposed to be a single.

Sometimes when you get on a creative roll, you become like a guy that's at a buffet who can't stop eating.  It makes perfect sense to me that once Brian and Van Dyke got into this new place, Brian just kept coming up with ideas that he wanted to add to the album, and so new tracks got started at a furious pace.

The only thing is...and this started to hit me at about the 18th track...you get to a certain point where you have all these great ideas and somehow you have to bring them to completion.  Starting them was easy and fun...but finishing them requires discipline and concentration and now you've doubled your workload.

There doesn't seem to be much question that this happened to Brian with SMiLE.  Now that alone isn't the reason why Brian didn't finish it, but it does explain why, when the pressures began to mount and his energies and mental state started to deterioate, SMiLE would go from a wonderful creative burst to a millstone.  You've got all these half-finished ideas that are great but now it's just a big pain in the ass and you just don't want to deal with it.

[The Song Of The Grange]

sofonanm, some great writing here on the Smile topic.  Bicyclerider and adamghost too.  It is nice to hear such cool headed, insightful discussions about this topic.  A great point is made by pointing out that Brian's modular style worked against his need for immediacy.  With a project like Pet Sounds he could nail the music in one day, maybe re-cut on another day, but again the music was fully realized right then and there for the most part.  His hunt for perfection and novel sounds/production values lead him away from the immediacy.  In a way, the GV sessions were a mini Smile--it took him endless sessions to perfect it and he very nearly gave up a few times.  GV ended in triumph.  But a whole album of GVs was too much to handle.  He got real damn close.  In fact I really believe in December 1966 when he brought the BBs in to finish the vocals, he was at a similar point in the project as when he brought the BBs in to finish the vocals on Pet Sounds (like the Feb. 7th, March 10th or April 11th and 13th sessions). Most of the Smile music was recorded, but there were a lot of vocals that never got done because of internal band disagreement.  The system that worked so wonderfully for Summer Days and Pet Sounds fell apart for Smile.

[buddhahat]

Depends on what you mean by "ego".

Smile captured a transcendent feeling - think of the "Over and over..." part of Cabinessence. Eternally cycling pieces that really have no beginning and no end in their structure.

Or think of the Eb/F chord right at the grand culmination of the gospel-like "Gotta keep those lovin' good vibrations a'happenin' with her" drift into silence from GV. It's like a wave of the ocean rising up high, "Ahhhhhhhhhhh", and then falling with a rush into the chorus, which descends from Bb to Ab to Gb until the next wave starts rising. I mean, maybe you don't hear it in this way but it's a deeply spiritual piece of music. Brian was capturing a pure essence of feeling that transcended the ordinary state of mind.

In my eyes this was Brian's biggest problem in completing Smile - how to capture this feeling without limiting it by conventional song structures. I could listen to the chorus of Child Is Father To The Man for the rest of my life, I don't need a change. It's perfection as it is. But how do you get that on record? It has to end somewhere, has to become something else. But the becoming aspect was not in Brian's head while writing or conceiving the album. Those feels, fragments, and pieces celebrate BEING. Brian wrote them as living feels capturing his state of mind and they probably filled his living room with sound for hours. Just filling the space like air.

In light of the culture and Brian's interests at the time - Smile was Brian's egoless music. Smile was capturing his experiences on drugs and, more importantly, in LIFE during times where he was beyond the limitations of his past, beyond the limitations of his own thoughts...

Think about the Who Ran The Iron Horse segment of Cabinessence. It has no beginning and no end. It's a steam train chugging through sparse landscapes in a different America! You can hear the wheels spinning round and those... bard things jumping up and down. You can feel the thick cloud of smoke trailing behind. Little sparks and flashes jumping up from the tracks. You can see it whirling around the landscape, passing herds of animals and small towns and natives of the land. There's no ego there, there's no Brian there, there's no Van Dyke there, there's no Beach Boys there. There's just that train and that land.

One year the Beach Boys are appealing to surfing and car interests with a few girls thrown in for good measure. The next Brian's making music documenting the feeling of Oriental workers stationed in America as they aimlessly watch a a bird gliding the winds above them in circles throughout the hot afternoon. Come on!!!!

Lovely post!

[SG7]

Smile is like the pink elephant in the room. I mean yes we can say it is finished (and trust me, I LOVE BWPS and I would never diss the efforts of those involved with it.) but all of those sessions and snippets from all those years before that are sitting there. A treasure worth to put together someday I say.

[Jason]

The idea of "conventional song structures" is an interesting one with regards to Smile. The fragments that Brian was writing for Smile were, in many cases, though not all, simple in concept - basically, just a couple of chords and then build an arrangement on them. Heroes and Villains is the best example - it's basically two chords for most of the song. Mrs. O'Leary's Cow is another example - two chords. A couple tunes have basic rock 'n roll progressions - the 1-4-5 (Vega-Tables, in the key of E).

I think to an extent, compositionally, Smile was simpler than Good Vibrations was. Good Vibrations has a lot of chords and the different fragments are almost all in different keys. I wouldn't say something like Smile is a complex form of songcraft, if you just take the songs as songs and not productions. Pet Sounds has far more complex songcraft, in the use of chords at least. Harmonically, Smile was more complex. The real complexity in Smile wasn't the music, it was the harmonies.

What I believe bogged Brian down around the end of '66, besides the obvious misgivings Michael and perhaps Carl and Al were having (Brian has mentioned all three as having had problems with the music) was indeed just how to fit all of these discordant fragments into something listenable. It's one thing to tackle one song, like with Good Vibrations, and that took six months.

Let's take an easy example to start off with. We'll take Wonderful. If we go by the August 25th version with the October 6th vocal overdubs, basically it's a live performance on the harpsichord with a French horn. Then on January 9th he tapes the "rock with me Henry" version, which gets what is pretty much a scratch vocal put on it. And with that one he felt the need to record a vocal tag at the end of the session for the backing track and unfinished vocals. This January version is more complex, with a jazzy arrangement, much more instrumentation, and a seeming lack of direction. Let's go to April. At this point he records yet another version with just himself on piano. A vocal overdub is attempted. Brian's piano playing sounds lifeless and detached and even a deaf person could tell something was going awry. We all can agree that Brian's original version was easily the best possible stab he took at recording the song, as the January and April recordings are either too out there (January) or totally lifeless (April).

Perhaps Child Is Father of the Man would be another good example. On October 7 he records an early version of the verse and chorus, and a reference mix is made combining the two. On the 12th he re-records the verse and chorus and records a bridge. This version is stitched together for reference purposes. This version is what he used as a basis for the chorus vocal overdubs on December 6, which he would later use in two acetate reference dubs. Both acetates are different in structure. Then in March he takes a total left turn and does ANOTHER version using what would later be the Vega-Tables vocal tag and a piano track with a newly recorded set of chorus vocals. By then he pretty much had lost the way with the song, as he apparently saw it as a part of Vega-Tables.

Heroes and Villains is the elephant in the living room. Innumerable fragments in varying stages of completion, test mixes made every step of the way, every single one different. A great reference dub is made in February. He throws it away. 'Nuff said.

The problem was that Brian kept changing his mind. It's one thing to do one song in Good Vibrations, and that one took him six months. But Brian went at Smile with guns blazing, ready to slaughter all of the cows in one shot. The problem was that Brian wasn't capable of a musical firebomb after 1966. He had lost his concentration, the amphetamines had caught up to him, and his undiagnosed mental illness had manifested itself. Everyone saw this, and they either were fired or left.

In short, Brian cut off his nose to spite his face, and that's why Smile never came out. This is not meant to be Brian bashing from a fan who has a picture of Michael as an avatar. It's the truth, and it's also, above all, a fact. Your mileage may vary since that's the e-world we live in. Michael will still be blamed every day by some arrogant 13 year old who discovers the Beach Boys.

[A Million Units In Jan!]

The April version of Wonderful is on the Smiley Smile SOT, right? Sometimes I forget what is what!
Actually, Sitting here thinking about all these sections, sometimes I start to get confused; 'Tag to this, Fade to that, take it out of this song  and make it an entire song on it's own, throw it out, put it back in over here, November version, February version'.   Sheesh 

[MBE]

What I believe bogged Brian down around the end of '66, besides the obvious misgivings Michael and perhaps Carl and Al were having (Brian has mentioned all three as having had problems with the music)

You wrote a very impressive piece here but I want to point out that it was probably the lyrics more then the music that troubled Mike. Al I think has said he only had trouble with the pig snort session, and other then Brian's faulty memory I see no real evidence that his brothers had any problem with anything.

[sofonanm]

if smile was finished in whatever form, which songs doo ya'll think the boys would've played live on a regular basis? i don't know too much about their live history but from pet sounds all they played was wibn/ysbim/sloop/gok/caroline and out of those only perhaps the first, third and fourth were played with any regularity, right? i'm probably wrong on that one.

[MBE]

Initally through 1966-67 It seems they only did GOK, WIBN, and Sloop. In the 71-74 period they did Caroline No, You Still Beilieve In Me, I'm Waiting For They Day, and Don't Talk. Mike does Here Today sometimes now, and it is fantastic. 

[adamghost]

It's funny...I think this is a spot-on analysis...except it doesn't totally let M. Love off the hook IMHO...members of the band not being supportive could have easily played into Brian's lack of confidence in the material and thus reworking it 'til he lost interest and focus and energy.  In fact, it's hard to see it not having done so.

That said, great insight.