SMiLE in $

[A Million Units In Jan!]

Has it ever been calculated about how much money was wasted on all of the 'proper' SMiLE sessions?

[Bill Barnyard]

It's a question I have asked on this board a couple of times.

I have read that Heroes & Villains was more expensive than Good Vibrations to record -which may be an indicator that overall costs for the sessions were relatively high for an album of this period, especially an aborted project like Smile.

Someone may have the figures out there.

 

[Andrew G. Doe]

It's a question I have asked on this board a couple of times.

I have read that Heroes & Villains was more expensive than Good Vibrations to record -which may be an indicator that overall costs for the sessions were relatively high for an album of this period, especially an aborted project like Smile.

Someone may have the figures out there.

 

Need to know the following:

hourly rates for four, five different studios in 1966-67...
union scale (easy, actually: $27.11/hour in 1966 $28.89/hour in early 1967 - that's basic, no overtime: leader and contractor get double rate)...
length & number of musicians at each session...
number of sessions...

From the AFM sheet, the cost of just the musicians for the 10/18/66 session for "Worms" was $1,685.94. This was a five and a half hour session with some musicians leaving after four and a half hours. Add to that the hourly rate for Western Three, the cost of the tape.. serious money.

[A Million Units In Jan!]

So you're saying it's a lot of work to figure it out? 

Man, that's a lot of money. I'd like to see a comparison of the money spent on SMiLE, and then compare it to what Smiley cost to record and what it actually sold. Obviously, they lost quite a bit of money.

[c-man]

So you're saying it's a lot of work to figure it out? 

Man, that's a lot of money. I'd like to see a comparison of the money spent on SMiLE, and then compare it to what Smiley cost to record and what it actually sold. Obviously, they lost quite a bit of money.

So how did Capitol go about regaining their loss (or did they just write it off)?  They were being sued by The Beach Boys for unpaid royalties, then of course the bottom fell out on The Beach Boys business (record sales and ticket sales both tanked starting in '67).  Of course, they made it all back and them some beginning in '74, but I'm curious if the Boys had to somehow make up for the loss at the time...obviously, if they'd received any kind of advance from Captiol for SMiLE, they would've been expected to return it...

[Myk Luhv]

Were the members of the Beach Boys also members of the musicians union? This is probably a stupid question but I'm not sure if being in the band disqualified them from membership in the union also. Or is it that because they were the band hiring the musicians -- even in cases where the other Beach Boys or Brian also played on the track -- they would not get paid as if they were also session musicians? Additionally, as I recall wasn't there a policy in place where overdubbing counted as using the same musician twice and so you'd pay again for the overdub in addition to the initial track the musicians had laid down?

Whole lotta (mundane) questions, no answers on my part. Sorry!

[c-man]

Were the members of the Beach Boys also members of the musicians union? This is probably a stupid question but I'm not sure if being in the band disqualified them from membership in the union also. Or is it that because they were the band hiring the musicians -- even in cases where the other Beach Boys or Brian also played on the track -- they would not get paid as if they were also session musicians? Additionally, as I recall wasn't there a policy in place where overdubbing counted as using the same musician twice and so you'd pay again for the overdub in addition to the initial track the musicians had laid down?

Whole lotta (mundane) questions, no answers on my part. Sorry!

The Beach Boys were indeed members of the L.A. (Local 47) Musicians Union.  But once they started making a lot of money from record sales, concert appearances, T.V. appearances, etc., they apparently became a bit cavalier about getting paid for the instrumentation they provided for their own records...on one session tape I've heard (from 1964), one of them casually mentions that they have some checks waiting for them down at the Union office, and another says something like, "Oh yeah, I should go down and pick those up some time".  As for overdubbing, if a musician played more than one instrument on a song, even if it was something like playing tambourine in the verses and tympani in the choruses on the same basic track, it counted as a "double"; in fact, there was even a column on the contract for just that thing.

[Mr. Cohen]

The BBs were infamous about not giving a f*** about money. Brian would leave checks worth tens of thousands of dollars around his house for months.

[A Million Units In Jan!]

The BBs were infamous about not giving a foder about money. Brian would leave checks worth tens of thousands of dollars around his house for months.

According to Tony Asher, yeah. That was one of the things that made him dislike Brian so much (back then).

Still, I believe even the BB's would realize how much money Brian threw out the window by recording music that was never used, as well as cancelling sessions which cost them  tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars.

[♩♬🐸 Billy C ♯♫♩🐇]

I think an even better question would be, how much was spent in "adjusted" dollars? Like, how much would it be in 2010 dollars?

[BJL]

I tried to figure out some very approximate cost estimates:

if we take the $1,685 worms session as average (rounded to 1,500) and further assume that, not counting Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains, Brian worked on about 12 songs, with about four sessions per song, that comes to 72,000 dollars (just to pay the musicians). 

Good Vibrations was supposedly given a budget of 50,000 dollars (according to wikipedia).  If we assume Heroes and Villains had about an equal cost, that's 100,000 for the two singles, plus at least 72,000 for the rest of the tracks.

Adjusted for inflation, 172,000 1967 dollars is $1,093,042 in 2009 dollars. 

Add to that the cost of tape, studio time, etc. for the other tracks (presumably those costs were included in the 50,000 dollar good vibes estimate), the cost of designing and printing up thousands of record sleeves and booklets, the costs of the promotion they were doing, and you've gotta be looking at at least a few million 2009 dollars. 

[Mike's Beard]

They were a money pit by '67 and were very lucky that Capital didn't drop them. Record companies seemed to be more loyal to artists back then. If this were to happen today - forget it, they would have been shown the door pronto.

[Andrew G. Doe]

I tried to figure out some very approximate cost estimates:

if we take the $1,685 worms session as average (rounded to 1,500) and further assume that, not counting Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains, Brian worked on about 12 songs, with about four sessions per song, that comes to 72,000 dollars (just to pay the musicians). 

Good Vibrations was supposedly given a budget of 50,000 dollars (according to wikipedia).  If we assume Heroes and Villains had about an equal cost, that's 100,000 for the two singles, plus at least 72,000 for the rest of the tracks.

Adjusted for inflation, 172,000 1967 dollars is $1,093,042 in 2009 dollars. 

Add to that the cost of tape, studio time, etc. for the other tracks (presumably those costs were included in the 50,000 dollar good vibes estimate), the cost of designing and printing up thousands of record sleeves and booklets, the costs of the promotion they were doing, and you've gotta be looking at at least a few million 2009 dollars. 

If you back-engineer the alleged cost of "GV" (track only), the average works out way higher. Remember, the studio rate was the same for one musician or twenty four, so my best guess right now would be that in 1966-67 Capitol threw at least a quarter-million dollars at the Smile project in session costs alone.

[A Million Units In Jan!]

Also, the cost of the roughly 260 thousand copies of the booklet and covers that were made....

[DonnyL]

Has it ever been calculated about how much money was wasted on all of the 'proper' SMiLE sessions?

i just calculated it ... $0.00

[A Million Units In Jan!]

Has it ever been calculated about how much money was wasted on all of the 'proper' SMiLE sessions?

i just calculated it ... $0.00

Ah, touche.

[The Heartical Don]

Has it ever been calculated about how much money was wasted on all of the 'proper' SMiLE sessions?

i just calculated it ... $0.00

You got there first... I was thinking up a joke on the word 'wasted', but that's not necessary any more. Chapeau!

[A Million Units In Jan!]

And you know, when I first wrote that I remember thinking about going back and switching out the word 'wasted' and putting in 'spent' and forgot to do it.

[Andrew G. Doe]

Also, the cost of the roughly 260 thousand copies of the booklet and covers that were made....

Try 420,000 slicks and about 400,000 booklets. 

[Mikie]

I never thought of this before, but the response from Capitol on the Beach Boys royalties lawsuit in 1967 could have been, "Hey, we ate the cost of Smile". You owe us!

And I know Capitol has made that money back probably ten-fold (beginning with Endless Summer and Spirit of America) but I wonder how much they could make today with a Beach Boys Smile Sessions box set if it were released. 

[A Million Units In Jan!]

Also, the cost of the roughly 260 thousand copies of the booklet and covers that were made....

Try 420,000 slicks and about 400,000 booklets. 

Whoa. I must be thinking of a copy of the memo that's in LLVS! where they mention the number 250,000. Maybe that's how many more were going to be printed up after the initial ones?

[Andrew G. Doe]

Memo says 100,000 booklets from Los Angeles (which cost $5,425, btw, so for the entire first run would be about $22,000). The memo for the front slicks says 300,000 from Scranton, 100,000 from LA, so I'm assuming (could be wrong) that a further 300,000 booklets would be printed to make up the full package.

[Cam Mott]

Someone should e-mail management at EastWest studio and ask if they have any records of what the Studio 3 rate was in 1966. It wouldn't hurt to also ask if they have any records/logs for Studio3 back to 1966.

[Peter Reum]

One of the reasons The Beach Boys were so cash strapped later in the Sixties is besides poor sales, relatively speaking, Capitol charged off those expenses from Smile against upcoming royalties as was the standard business practice in the record business in the Sixties. Brian`s not finishing Smile essentially was a  contributing reason to why The Beach Boys had financial problems from roughly 1968 to 1970 when the advance from the Warner contract took hold. Steve Desper can substantiate the history of how cash strapped the group was in that period. He had to pursue court action to get paid for his engineering services at least once or twice.

[Mikie]

I had a feeling that was the case.  That explains that!

I'd also guess that Capitol got some of that money back from 1966-1968 by releasing Greatest Hits Vol 1-3 and the Deluxe Set.