I love it when people grasp at straws to prop up an idee fixee of theirs that's crumbling at the edges.
Go back to my post of
exactly what the engineer said - no, I'll save you the trouble:
"there is possibly another way of telling the story you are referring to, and I was there". This guy worked at Sound Recorders, in fact he was, in essence, serving an apprenticeship there. Ergo, he wouldn't go anywhere else (and that anywhere would have to be Columbia).
Here's another problem - people are taking part of what Van Dyke said as gospel, but when it conflicts with what they're thinking, hey, suddenly he's got it wrong. Can't have your cake and eat it too - he's either reliable... or not. In light of what I and several others have deduced, in this instance - not. My money is still on his misremembering the 4/10/67 "Vega Tables" vocal session. If you take what VDP says in Dom's book and stack it up against an established timeline and proven facts, it totally falls apart. He says before they started
Pepper, The Beatles covertly heard a
Smile 8-track at Sound Recorders and it influenced them. Wrong, wrong and wrong: Sound Recorders didn't have 8-track capability in spring 1967,
Pepper started in January anyway and by April the vast majority of the recording for it was done.
So... someone please tell me - why are we still having this arguement ?
Gotta go with AGD on this one. Remember, we're not talking about
if The Beatles ever heard SMiLE tapes. In fact, I'm sure that at some point later on they did. We're talking about if they heard them
before work started on Sgt. Pepper. That's the whole basis of this conversation, isn't it? It's what Van Dyke is talking about-that SMiLE directly influenced Sgt. Pepper. And it's pretty clear that it didn't happen. So, short of calling VDP a liar, I'd go with the idea that he's got events confused in his head.