Best track on the Beach Boys' SMiLE

Surf's Up

i mean yeah, there's really only one *right* answer here isn't there...but with a tracklist like that it's almost crazier that that's the case

Cabin Essence

I'm torn between 'Wonderful' and 'Cabin Essence', both excellent songs. I've heard 'Good Vibrations' way too many times, and I'm kinda bored of 'Surf's Up'.

Cabin Essence and Heroes & Villains are certainly the most "Smile-y" of the major tracks. Good Vibrations really feels like a tack-on when placed at the end of the album. Surf's Up stands on its own as a solid, maybe even transcendent in the right mood, but not particularly relevant, Four Freshmen throwback. Cabin Essence gets my vote for having the best combination of tight composition, memorable hooks and over-the-top experimental sounds. Heroes & Villains never really comes together as evidenced by the dozens of hours of studio effort spent trying to piece it into a proper followup to GV.

The ascending and descending background harmonies to the "who ran the iron horse?" bit is one of my favourite moments of the Smile tracks, especially when it gets repeated at the end for the outro.

I can only hear this album as a buildup to Good Vibrations

I can only hear this album as a buildup to Good Vibrations

I like the sequencing of Brian Wilson Presents Smile — within the context of Brian's career, it's fitting that his solo release of Smile should end on the redemptive note of 'Good Vibrations.' but I'm less satisfied with 'Good Vibrations's placement as the final track on the Smile Sessions reconstruction. the unfinished 1967 Smile sessions are so haunted and melancholy (both lyrically/musically and in terms of the role they play in the Beach Boys' mythology) that 'Surf's Up' is the only emotionally satisfying way to conclude the album. I actually prefer the running order of certain bootlegs (Mok's Smile and Ryan Guidry's Smile both do a decent job) to the Smile Sessions box.

(I also think Smile sounds much better in stereo, authenticity be damned)

Wind Chimes is my favorite arrangement so voting that.

good vibrations is objectively the greatest song ever but cabin essence

wld also vote for the song from walk hard that basically just a parody of this album

my shortlist would be windchimes, heroes & villians, vegetables and good vibrations

has anybody dug up the (probably apocryphal) 10+ minute version of good vibrations they made?

actually it was purported to be 15+ minutes long, ian penman referenced it in the wire iirc

there is no 15 minute version of "good vibrations". it's just that, you know, they did something like 75 hours of sessions for the single, and you can easily string together the existing sessions (all the vocal sessions for the tune are lost, so it's all backing track stuff) into 15 minutes or more of music (see: disc 5 of the "good vibrations" box set). you can do the same thing with "heroes and villains"- there's a fan edit that runs to 21:43, although it's obvious that the song was not intended as a side-long composition.

i want it to exist so bad!

We all did our edit back in the day (my own edit of H&V actually was 7 mins spot on, without trying to be)

Having said that, I believe this to be a perfect version of how it would have been:

http://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-beach-boys-smile-1967.html

"Child Is Father Of The Man" - but I haven't heard the officially redone/released version.
the original on the Smile bootleg was the deepest most haunting cut, so that.

Obviously it's Surf's Up but I have so much time for this album. This has prob already been said but I don't really see it as a collection of individual songs, so much as a suite, so trying to discern favourites is futile. I like a lot of the 'Smiley Smile' versions of these songs too - especially the creepiness of Wind Chimes and Wonderful.

Never been a big fan of Heroes & Villains though, I must say. Something really clumsy and unsatisfying about that song.

u so crazy

Something very Roxy Music about "Heroes & Villains".

Yah rly. Although I can't put my finger on why. I could imagine them covering it.

Tempted to vote "Fire," as hearing that at the record store Low Yo Yo Stuff in Athens was probably what got me to buy my first bootleg of this back in the day. But I have this a bit blurred together with another, earlier occasion when hearing "Vega-Tables" at a different Athens record store (Wuxtry) got my roommate to buy Smiley Smile. It's been literally years since I listened to anything but the Brian Wilson version (which I loved), but y'all are convincing me to sail back out into the Sea of Tunes tonight.

voted "Our Prayer"

"our prayer" is a noble vote...what do we think brian's primary influence was on that? what else can i check? i know he was crazy for gershwin at this time especially but i'm not sure i've heard anything of his that really reminds me of something like "prayer"

he was very into the Four Freshmen and other doo-wop/vocal groups, and the wordless intros and outros of songs like 'It's a Blue World' and 'Their Hearts Were Full of Spring' (which the Beach Boys covered during the Wild Honey sessions) were a likely influence on 'Our Prayer'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djDm2JVMm9Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iggWvFgp3KE

the unfinished 1967 Smile sessions are so haunted and melancholy (both lyrically/musically and in terms of the role they play in the Beach Boys' mythology) that 'Surf's Up' is the only emotionally satisfying way to conclude the album

OTM

I just can't do Smiley Smile. Talk about a depressing listen, knowing what it could have been.

hmm, the only track on Smiley Smile that depresses me is 'Wonderful'. Carl's lead vocal is appropriately plaintive, but the studio chatter is almost masochistic, as if Brian is punishing himself for his failed ambitions by desecrating one of his most affecting compositions with his own laughter. but a lot of the other tracks on Smiley Smile (Vegetables, She's Going Bald, Wind Chimes) were slightly goofy/incidental even in their Smile incarnations, so the Smiley Smile treatment isn't as jarring, and I can appreciate the band's impulse to loosen up for a change (and they at least had the good sense not to revisit 'Cabinessence' or 'Surf's Up'). Smiley Smile would have disappointed me enormously if I had been following the group in the '60s and anticipating a masterpiece, but viewed in retrospect as a laid-back companion to the Smile sessions, it isn't a particularly depressing listen. with all the Smile material available to us in 2015, we at least have a good approximation of 'what could have been', and I'm not particularly interested in speculating about how Smile would have been received it if had been fully realized in 1967 (or at any rate I don't think this knowledge would have much bearing on my enjoyment of the music).

So, after a fresh listen, I'm unexpectedly voting "Cabin Essence" as somehow the most Smile-ish track - we find the group at this really fascinating step just between the kind of genially fleshed-out sonics of Pet Sounds (themselves just this side of easy listening, but so much better), and the much much weirder, bad-trip abyss hinted at by "Fire" - there's something unsettling lurking in the "who ran the iron horse" section, and something lost and sad about the "over and over" part. My sense is that, as much as all the other factors, the gulf between those two worlds, which gives Smile a lot of its compelling quality as a listen, is a big reason for its not being completed, and also for the tantalizing but hard-to-imagine prospect of Brian Wilson being able to pull it all together, to make a whole of fantasia and phantasmagoria. "Surf's Up" does have the aching sense of distance and loss, but the only real hints of a personality pulled in two come with those great dissonant brass shudders, and in the version I have, those are a discrete passage just before the solo-piano song commences -- not really part of the piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTifX3mpnV4

i gave it a relisten this afternoon and "good vibrations" all the way

Smiley Smile is my favourite Beach Boys' album. Think I might have heard it in its entirety before Pet Sounds or Smile. I don't find it depressing at all. It's p much exactly what I want out of a lot of music I listen to.

"Surf's Up", though I prefer the overdubbed version that was eventually released on the like-titled album to the Smile version which still feels a bit incomplete.

Wow, love "It's a Blue World". Need to check out the Four Freshmen....

The Smiley Smile version of Wind Chimes is fantastically eerie. I wouldn't go as far as Dog Latin bt it's a v special album in its own right

i still forget in my mind that "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter" is not a Smile track. I wish they had done whole records like that track. It's like proto-residents.

Also, can we pause itt for a second to just say THE MOTHERFUCKING WRECKING CREW.

'Their Hearts Were Full of Spring' (which the Beach Boys covered during the Wild Honey sessions)

they were copying that well before '67

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

Fall Breaks And Back To Winter is kind of a reconstruction of Fire/Mrs O'Leary's Cow though, no? I love it though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb8a-obj0xs

They did it on their first demo tape as well (1961)

?

Listening to too much Four Freshmen will make you realize why people were primed for the British invasion... definitely a good Brian Wilson primer though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4NafK3NFhA

I love the fact that Smiley Smile is a far more uncommercial and strange record than the record it replaced!

hmm idk about that

if anything i think smiley smile is a good riposte to anybody who thinks that weirder = better

i still forget in my mind that "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter" is not a Smile track. I wish they had done whole records like that track. It's like proto-residents.
― demonic mnevice (Jon Lewis)

Yes, Residential, exactly! That one was also known as "Woody Woodpecker Symphony" right? Woody's "laugh" is in there.

"Wind Chimes" is inadvertently hilarious on Smiley Smile, dudes trippin on their wind chimes

Cabin Essence, Child is Father of the Man, Wonderful all mean more to me than Surf's Up, Good Vibrations, Heroes & Villains (all great songs)

it's weird, i first knew "wonderful" and "windchimes" in their SMILE arrangements via Baby Lemonade's mid 90s covers
http://cdn.discogs.com/02ohUR_Uu3OFgO39XqyaXOuE9pc=/fit-in/428x425/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(96)/discogs-images/R-1529903-1288556500.jpeg.jpg
i knew the smiley smile versions, and was shocked at how beautiful baby lemonade had made them -- without knowing then that they had covered the smile versions pretty much note for note.

I love the way he sings Wonderful on Smiley Smile, but that groovy party sound effects interlude is so pointless. If I ever stick that on a mix again I think I'll just snip it or stick some other song between the beginning and end.

I had a "Smile sessions" cd before I heard "Smiley Smile", probably the right way round.

They did it on their first demo tape as well (1961)

― Mark G, Monday, May 18, 2015 12:05 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

?

― Οὖτις, Monday, May 18, 2015 12:18 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wrong clip posted - I can't find the right one, but "Their Hearts Were Full of Spring" was indeed included on the '61 demo tape they made for Capitol, apparently added at the last minute. Song written by Bobby Troup of "Route 66" fame.

I listened to the Smile Sessions last night. I have trouble discerning between sequences like Look -> Child is the Father, which work really well, especially as a lead up to Surf's Up, but they're more like instrumental sketches to me.

I own the Smile Sessions box set and I love it - it looks great on my shelf and all the amazing pullouts and all, but somehow when I put it on, it goes right over my head. Perhaps it's because I listened to my old bootleg copy of Smile, and then the Brian Wilson Smile so many times, I can't get much else out of it, but I dunno... The whole thing seems, I want to say 'polished' or 'unremarkable' or something, but that's not right either because it's far from those... It just drifts by. I found myself craving the rougher vocals but more realised musicality of the 2004 Smile somehow. I may revisit that.

I only know Smiley Smile and the version on the Good Vibrations box otherwise bt wld take Brian's version if I had to pick

I think we all felt that about the "Smile" sessions box, it was more of the same, and we'd already had the best bits.

That's why I rep for the "Albums that never were" blog version as linked to above. There's a mono, a stereo, and a version based on the 'Brian Wilson Presents' track selection order but using the original takes. That last one to me was as unsatisfying as the BWPS itself (if you get me), but the Mono and Stereo versions are great.

Did anyone have the bootleg 3LP version, where side 6 was basically The Beach Boys playing a game of "nominate and vote out" (Basically, the TV show "Big Brother" thirty years ahead), and Mike Love went first out. He was not best pleased.

haha, i really want to hear that.

mark, where is the link to the best bootleg version IYO?

i lost mine years ago.

I don't know, I was wondering if someone else here still had it. If you mean the 3LP version...

If not, I was meaning : http://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-beach-boys-smile-1967.html

This really should have been a "best track on Brian Wilson presents Smile" poll, come to think of it. That is the finished version, after all. I understand the appeal of listening to the '60s sessions, and of course it would have been fantastic if the album got finished back then too. Sadly, it didn't. For all its vocal imperfections and all the "what if's?", I'm happy to call the 2004 Smile the definitive version.

In fact, the track order on the 2004 Smile feels so "meant to be", that I actually struggle to hear the album in any other order!

On that note, voted On a Holiday

Does "Hit the dirt, do a two-and-a-half" refer to doing a 900?

I continue to listen to the MokSmile mix more than the official version. It's about an hour long and has all the "best bits" from the available bootlegs at the time. I did replace Surf's Up with the Unsurpassed Masters 16 version though.

2004 is really amazing in an almost too-good-to-be true way.

i remember a lot of people disliking it at the time, mainly because of BW's voice being a little on the croaky side, but it never bothered me. it's really good.

I just watched the live version on Youtube of the full 2004 live performance. Superb.

yeah i kind of wrote it off since i figured why listen to an old throat remake w/ a bunch of anons on harmony when i could be having the young beach boys doing most of it...but the praise here makes me wanna revisit the '04 version soon

I'm one of those Neanderthals who pretty much doesn't get the Beach Boys, but I ended up seeing that 2004 tour and yes, it really was superb.

it's definitely the most fully-formed one of the bunch and there are a few nice surprises in there.

Nice surprises, plus the irresistible emotional draw of hearing this guy complete this thing after nearly forty years, seemingly right in front of you. Like every time two bits come together that you didn't expect to, it could choke you up it's so redemptive.

^^

I had a listen to it yesterday and I'm sad to say it thrashes Smile Sessions. Hadn't realised how incomplete those versions are by comparison. A wonderful box-set, but something like 'I Wanna Be Around/Friday Night' is so much better with Brian's lead vocal. Listening to Sessions is like listening to the Stack-O-Tracks version

I love that a) it got finished, beautifully and b) it's also still around in all these ghost forms. Tbh I'm glad it all worked out the way it did. Xpost yeah Brian's older voice suits those elements if Smile rly well

I love the way the 2004 Smile is perfectly, neatly divided up into three distinct "movements" and the pieces flow together so well and so seamlessly that it feels like this was how the record was meant to be all along, even though if it had been finished/released in the '60s, it may have taken a different form entirely. The second "movement" in particular (from 'Wonderful' to 'Surf's Up') is just incredible, I think. I have no problems calling the 2004 Smile the definitive version, really. It's an impressive set of material.

Yes but those voices. The feeling of those voices
The wrecking crew
These factors are overwhelming for me

ah they're not so bad.

xp yeah that's really the deciding factor for me -- beach boys vocals + wrecking crew are going to beat pretty much everything/anything.

Not the 2004 voices! The o.g. ones

It's a case of the sublime being the worst enemy of the excellent

Xp

Yes but those voices. The feeling of those voices
The wrecking crew
These factors are overwhelming for me

I have zero interest in the 2004 version for precisely these reasons

Brian's older voice suits those elements if Smile rly well

The idea that it took him until he was an old(er) man to record the final version, and that older voice looking back on these songs, adds a new a wonderful dimension to it that would've been missing entirely from a 60s release.

The more nostalgic bits of 2004 are even more heartwrenching when you realize he is also thinking back to his own youth. It's a form of subtle and yet total nostalgia.

yeah that really struck me on my '04 relisten today. that the whole thing literally begins with the lyric,

I've been in this town so long that back in the city
I've been taken for lost and gone
And unknown for a long long time

just wow.

Adam Bruneau and soyrev OTM.

Yes, the album would have been great with the Beach Boys' vocals and the Wrecking Crew playing on it, but the Beach Boys + Wrecking Crew didn't finish the album.

I can definitely see that there's a valid bio-musicological angle, yeah. Kind of a Glenn Gould '55 Glenn Gould '80 thing.

also "in blue hawaii" is beautiful with vocals, remembering that now. it's great to have both but yeah the beach boys, the wrecking crew, the songs having been fresh in the hands of someone who knew they could change the world...i might ultimately prefer that to the beauty of brian finally finishing the thing and all the lovely layers of reflection/redemption albeit in a voice not even a thousandth of what it was, with the use of digital keyboards/percussion in place of real things like harpsichord and timpani, and with the knowledge that the songs' completion at this point meant personal significance, no longer historical. both listens involve compromises, and both remain great because these are compromises on what was very close to being the best album in history.

Valid= stupid word pls excuse me

wow, i had no idea the 2004 version was so highly regarded. i'm gonna have to check it out now.

I don't it really was that highly regarded. Pitchfork put it at #5 on its top 50 albums of 2004, behind The Firey Furnaces, The Streets, Animal Collective, and The Arcade Fire. It only made it to #25 in the Staff Top 100.

http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/5956-the-top-100-albums-of-2000-04-part-one/8/

the thing that gets me re: smile is that the "smile sessions" isn't really a "1967" album at all. it's the existing '66/'67 recording (with, actually, later interpolations on tracks like "cabinessence" and "surf's up") reassembled to follow the progression of the 2004 recording.

because smile is kind of a weird case, in that it was maybe 90% recorded and 50% written. reconstructionists like to assume some kind of master plan as to what smile would have been in brian wilson's brain, but looking at the historical data there's absolutely no evidence that such a "master plan" actually existed. that, more than anything else, was why "smile" failed at the time- it wasn't so much that brian couldn't get the vision for the record out of his head, it was that the vision wasn't quite there in his head in the first place!

the 1966-67 "smile" sessions are amazing. they're full of life and energy and all sorts of things that can't be recreated. however, they are not, in any sense, an album. and while 2004 smile has maturity and wisdom and all kinds of things in its favor that the '66-'67 recordings don't have, its chief advantage is that it is an album. and yes, it has been sorely underrated, in my opinion, especially among the hardcore fans, because it wasn't the album they had in their heads. a lot of people had built it up to something it could never be, something that would've destroyed sgt. pepper, blah blah, woof woof, and i think that as a result some folks were less open hearing it for what it is.

I don't buy this idea that people who don't like the 2004 version are somehow just not open to its charms. I did and do rate it highly but it has only a fraction of the magic of the session material. The best parts are, as others have mentioned, the new sections that successfully link everything together and the afterglow of a job finally done. The latter has dwindled in importance and will continue to do so as time goes by. Darian and company are not the Wrecking Crew but they did a nice job overall. The worst part by far is Brian's voice which I find weak and sad, not nostalgic. He just can't hit or hold the notes. ("Bygone, bygone" isn't even him.) For me the major appeal of the Beach Boys lies in their vocals and that will push me to the session material every time.

In the end the name is perfect - "Brian Wilson Presents Smile". And really, the amazing thing about the bootlegs is how close they got to the eventual 'real' thing.

I can't believe I let myself get sucked into another one of these arguments about angels dancing on the head of a pin :)

see, it's the "magic" thing that gets me. whatever "magic" happens to constitute, i just don't think the '66-'67 sessions qualify. the painful irony underlying the whole project was that van and brian were making an album called "smile" at the same time brian, at least, was systematically destroying himself through substance abuse while desperately searching for a better way through his music. the 2004 record works for me because even though brian in his sixties clearly can't sing like he could at 24, his voice openly acknowledges that tremendous sadness and pain, rather than trying to suppress it. his voice has almost a robert wyatt quality to it. sure, brian's voice isn't technically up to the material, but then again smile was never really a technical exercise, was it?

i also don't think that actually finishing the record is unimportant, and i say that as someone who's left behind a couple dozen abandoned half-finished projects that i lost confidence in about 75% through (also why i don't regret discussing this, because in doing so i'm talking about things that are important to my life). it's a question of potentiality versus actuality. you know, "edwin drood" for instance is something that has an actual, proper ending, and i'd like to know what it is.

smile was never really a technical exercise, was it?

seems hugely technical to me

I like all of it really: the sessions, the versions that showed up on other records, the heartwarming triumph of the 2004 completion. But I was never going to think the material on Smile is better than Pet Sounds - and I also doubt it's actually better than Today or Wild Honey either.

That Brian Wilson, however addled, could be thrown that much off his game that much by Sgt. Pepper should tell us something: it was about the bigness, seizing the moment, DefEATing the BEATles.

But I'm an ungrateful pop fan, almost as likely to be reached by some recorded excitement, some half-assed junk, some half-felt professionalism, some desperately lame notion that inexplicably works.....as by Obsessive Labor of A Genius.

I think there's a bunch of great material generated by the Smile effort, and on Pepper too, but neither is The Greatest Thing Ever --- it's not even the best stuff by those bands.

that would be Kokomo

well, sgt pepper came out a month after smile was cancelled -- i don't think competition w/ the beatles had much to do with the derailing of the project. technical challenges actually probably played as much of a role as brian's mental state:

Audio engineer and The Smile Sessions co-producer Mark Linett speculated that Wilson could not have finished the album simply because his ambitions were impossible to fulfill with pre-digital technology, accordingly: "In 1966, (assembling pieces) meant physically cutting pieces of tape and sticking them back together — which is how all editing was done in those days — but it was a very time-consuming and labor-intensive process, and most importantly made it very hard to experiment with the infinite number of possible ways you could assemble this puzzle." Sessions co-producer Alan Boyd shared the same view, stating that the tape editing "would have been probably an unbearably arduous, difficult and tedious task."

John Frankenheimer killed Smile

that would be Kokomo

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, May 20, 2015 4:41 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes! What previous Beach Boys song was associated with Tom Cruise anyway?

**********

As far as the other by (The Other), I know there's a famous story of Brian Wilson completely losing it when Sgt. Pepper came out, is that a myth (would be interesting if it was!)

define "completely losing it"

I think that story is apocryphal but who knows

At that point he ws losing it over a lot of things tho

I don't it really was that highly regarded. Pitchfork put it at #5 on its top 50 albums of 2004, behind The Firey Furnaces, The Streets, Animal Collective, and The Arcade Fire. It only made it to #25 in the Staff Top 100.

― ©Oz Quiz© (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, May 20, 2015 6:09 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, but that's just Pitchfork. The eventual rating on Metacritic was 97/100!

http://www.metacritic.com/music/smile/brian-wilson

the 1966-67 "smile" sessions are amazing. they're full of life and energy and all sorts of things that can't be recreated. however, they are not, in any sense, an album. and while 2004 smile has maturity and wisdom and all kinds of things in its favor that the '66-'67 recordings don't have, its chief advantage is that it is an album. and yes, it has been sorely underrated, in my opinion, especially among the hardcore fans, because it wasn't the album they had in their heads. a lot of people had built it up to something it could never be, something that would've destroyed sgt. pepper, blah blah, woof woof, and i think that as a result some folks were less open hearing it for what it is.

― rushomancy, Wednesday, May 20, 2015 6:30 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM.

As far as the other by (The Other), I know there's a famous story of Brian Wilson completely losing it when Sgt. Pepper came out, is that a myth (would be interesting if it was!)

― Vic Perry, Wednesday, May 20, 2015 9:50 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The story I heard was that it was 'Strawberry Fields Forever', rather than the Sgt. Pepper's album that made Brian Wilson "lose it"... which makes sense, because the 'Penny Lane'/'Strawberry Fields Forever' single was released several months ahead of Sgt. Pepper's.

I don't know if digital editing would have helped. In the case of Heroes & Villains, which does seem to be the precipitant of a lot of the problems, the pieces he was playing with were not going to create the next Good Vibrations in any possible assembly.

I feel like I'm having to provide sources for the George Washington cherry tree legend here, but without wasting more than 5 minutes of my time I found these two retellings:

"Sgt. Pepper broke Brian Wilson’s heart. He had a nervous breakdown after hearing the seminal album in 1967. Because of this, he didn’t complete the Beach Boys’ album Smile until 2004."
http://www.pimplomat.com/2012/03/15/the-rewind-button-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band/

"In June of 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out. Brian Wilson is said to have heard it and wept."
http://therumpus.net/2012/04/forever-changeless-the-beach-boys-the-smile-sessions/

I'm not endorsing these by the way...

Given the chronology though, what Turrican presents as the story does make a lot more sense....as well as that it makes sense that SFF/Penny Lane was quite a bit more impressive appearing at the beginning of 67 than Sgt Pepper was that summer.

Brian got to hear it some time before it got released.

Just sayin'

those are both unsubstantiated, unattributed anecdotes

I've read a bunch of BB/Brian Wilson biographies and can't recall a specific, sourced instance of anyone relating Brian Wilson's initial reaction to Sgt Pepper's. Seems likely that Macca would've played some of it for Brian ahead of the release when he came over to chomp celery on Vega-tables.

xp

Oh yeah, definitely unsubstantiated. I was just saying that I'd heard a different story to what Vic Perry had. For what it's worth, Brian himself debunked this story in a Q&A last year.

Q: The story goes that when you first heard Strawberry Fields Forever you felt weakened by it. Has any song in the past ten years made you feel that way again?

A: No, that's not true. It was a very weird record, but yeah, I liked it.

http://www.brianwilson.com/news/2014/1/29/brian-answers-fans-questions-in-live-qa

But if there was any truth in it, then the 'Strawberry Fields Forever' anecdote would have made far more sense, just because it was the first thing to appear from the Sgt. Pepper's sessions, months in advance. Having said that, wasn't Derek Taylor working for The Beach Boys by this point?

yes, that's covered in "Look!Listen!Smile!Vibrate!", among other places

Yeah, so he clearly had Beatle connections. I wonder if he did hear any of the Sgt. Pepper's stuff in advance, then? I wonder if The Beatles ever heard any of the work in progress on the Smile sessions? Although for some reason, I suspect they didn't. The Beatles never seemed shy about letting their friends hear stuff pre-release, but I suspect Brian Wilson may have been a little more secretive with Smile.

I wonder if The Beatles ever heard any of the work in progress on the Smile sessions?

Paul was at a Smile session in April '67

"Rubber Soul inspired Pet Sounds, which inspired Sgt. Pepper’s and that inspired me to make Smile,” Brian Wilson tells me, recalling his 1960s game of one-upmanship with the Beach Boys’ so-called rivals The Beatles.

“It wasn’t really a rivalry, though. I was jealous!” Wilson says with a hearty laugh. “It was really just mutual inspiration, I think. I would get to hear their records before they came out and I was totally blown away by Rubber Soul. And Sgt. Pepper’s? I was totally blown away by that. But it was inspirational, too.

Won Won Wonderful
dun nuh nuh-nuh nuh

all that is well and good but the drug abuse and mental illness are probably better places to look.

yup

xxxxpost:

Oh yeah, of course, 'Vega-Tables'. Duh!

I wonder how much of the material he heard that was recorded up to that point, then?

Thought Paul played him an acetate of "She's Leaving Home" and it flipped him out, is the story I heard.

As for why Brian was losing his shit, it was drugs. Drugs also explain the whole "I will write an amazing album that will be the best thing ever and lead people to God" pretty easily. It was also kind of pop fashion at the time. This is just a year after John Lennon telling the press his band is bigger than Jesus.

Everyone was on drugs, basically.

In April 1967, McCartney visited Brian Wilson in L.A. to preview Sgt. Pepper, playing "She's Leaving Home" on the piano for him and his wife. "We both just cried," Wilson said. "It was beautiful."

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-beatles-songs-20110919/shes-leaving-home-19691231#ixzz3ajLLoriG

rushomancy OTM in this thread. we're often led to believe in BW's all-encompassing genius. but getting stuff finished is one of the hardest things to do, and it's all too easy to scrap a project just as it nears completion - I believe that's a really bizarre but common human trait that goes unacknowledged in criticism. there must be so many 75% masterpieces out there that never saw the light of day because a lyric was out of place or a solo hadn't quite been figured out and the auteur wanted it to be 'perfect' but ultimately couldn't get it right.

"Don't Stand Me Down" for a kickoff. At least two tracks added that weren't perfect enough at the time, and now it makes more sense.

the idea that BW listened to Sgt Peppers and had a mental breakdown is p much nonsense. there's also a dispute as to how much acid he took in his time - some reports say he only did it one or two times while others say he took a shit-ton. either way, i'm not even sure either the Beatles or LSD were the real source of his troubles.

something that doesn't get mentioned much about the paul's visit of april '67 is that paul seems to have been kind of a dick during it. listen to the '67 jamake highwater interview; highwater starts talking about how awesome the beatles are and brian wilson basically says, in a polite way, "yeah, the beatles are great- too bad they're assholes". for all of paul's professional admiration for brian wilson, they don't ever seem to have developed any sort of a personal rapport. see also all the times brian has basically publicly begged paul to write a song with him, and paul's obvious disinterest in doing such a thing.

if anything the beach boy the beatles seem to have been closest to during this period was mike love, because they were both on the same maharishi thing.

Well, how many people would have been wanting to team up with Paul, should that one have happened?

A bit like that song Norman Smith (their studio engineer at the time) offered the Beatles when they had no songs left. John (who wasn't there at the time of the offer) doubtless said "U crazy we can't do that!"

I only just realised this but neither Smile 2004 or Smile Sessions has a version of He Gives Speeches/She's Goin Bald; or am I wrong?

The other thing about Smile which I hadn't noticed, is how much of a 'mashup' album it is, referencing and repurposing old doo-wop songs and standards like there's no tomorrow - Gee, Get A Job, The Old Master Painter, You Are My Sunshine (maybe more)... Had many people done this before?

the only thing that springs to mind is buchanan and goodman's 1956 novelty hit "the flying saucer", but of course that's a very different beast to smile. (also add to that "i wanna be around", incidentally.)

the way i see it there are two important artistic choices bw, vdp, & co made on the 2004 version that no fan editor would have made. first is arranging the music into three suites. all the fan edits of the material up to that time had focused on making a record that could have come out on a single lp, but the 2004 sequencing makes that impossible. that's the first thing that says to me that 2004 smile is not simply a "recreation".

the second choice is implied in the first, in that in the 2004 smile (which was, perversely enough, originally put together for live performance) the songs all segue. there's precisely one fade on the whole record, at the very end; even the first two suites come to a cold ending (actually, the same cold ending). this necessitates throwing out rather a lot of the material recorded during the '66-'67 sessions, which almost all have fades. they're pretty great fades, too. songs like "wind chimes" and "do you like worms?" have what are to my mind some of the greatest fades ever recorded, and i don't think anybody who wasn't brian wilson would've felt comfortable leaving them on the cutting room floor.

"he gives speeches" and "with me tonight", both of which had versions recorded during the "smile" sessions proper, tend to be left off people's conceptions of "smile" for two reasons. first is that vdp didn't work on either of them. second is that there's a pretty strong allegiance to the 12-song lp tracklisting when talking about what "smile" is. songs like "look" and "holidays" got in because people assigned them to the mythical construct known as "the elements". aside from "mrs. o'leary's cow", nobody is actually sure what "the elements" consisted of or how many parts it was going to have- even "love to say da-da" (the basis for the second part of "in blue hawaii") was the last "smile" recording session in may '67, and was abandoned unfinished; the "water chant" (the first part of "in blue hawaii" and the middle part of "cool, cool water") comes from later in '67, during the "wild honey" sessions. what brian meant "the elements" to be when he delivered that tracklist in late '66 is fundamentally unknowable.

(also add to that "i wanna be around", incidentally.)

Not being that familiar with much pre-sixties music, I had no idea this was also a rip. Wow! But also wow, in that these are almost complete reimaginings of these tracks.

That kind of chestnut quoting/recontextualizing had been done a lot in classical music (eg Ives) and film scores (eg Alex north "the bad seed") and was the bread and butter of jazz and exotica but was pretty fresh in pop

The legend is that Brian Wilson heard the Mothers of Invention do "Call any Vegetable" and went home and pureed the tapes of "Vega-Tables" - resulting in the version heard on Smiley Smile.

The story goes that Paul McCartney then played Brian Wilson an advance demo of "Your Mother Should Know," and a shaken Brian decided to keep making records after all.

Didn't he own a vegetable shop for a while too?

What solicited the hyphen in Vega-Tables?

The legend is that Brian Wilson had become powerfully interested in astrology, specifically a niche variant that insisted that the charting of one's relationship to the star Vega would determine whether one's music was better or worse than Sgt. Pepper's. Unfortunately, before the track could be completed, he became aware of multiple variants on this theory, which was acknowledged in the lyrical suggestion of one's "favorite" Vega-Table.

otm, and there's evidence for that in BW's interview in Starsign magazine (from Belgium) in August 1968

Love that Vega-Table anecdote. Just goes to show how lost he was.

Yerrrrssss......

that's a wind-up shurely?

another big difference (for me at least) between the BW2004 version and the sessions is that there's no "You're Welcome" on the former.
It doesn't seem to be an obvious part of the original Smile project (like "With me tonight" which is also great) but I love that "song".
and it's a good way to end the album since it kinda mirrors "Our Prayer" as a (almost a cappella) chanting thing.

"he gives speeches" doesn't sound like it was gonna fit anywhere, either, but dang do i love it (and i bet britt daniel's with me)

Yeah, I love "He Gives Speeches." Maybe it would have fit in by not fitting, like "Sloop John B" on Pet Sounds.

the second choice is implied in the first, in that in the 2004 smile (which was, perversely enough, originally put together for live performance) the songs all segue.

This is interesting, because I've only ever really heard it on the vinyl release (three sides), and don't recall any really awkward breaks that jumped out at me! But I should throw it on again and see. Totally correct that a three-sided album was clearly not in the cards in 1967.

The possibility that always lurks under Smile speculation for me is: what if he had gotten it together and released it in 1967, and nobody had much cared? I think it would have been admired in certain circles, maybe even celebrated by a certain kind of hep cat, but I really find it hard to imagine it would have been this barnstorming, generation-defining record. It's wonderful, wonderful music, but if Pet Sounds didn't really hit home in the US then surely this wouldn't have either. At best it would have been its generation's OK Computer or something like that - absolutely hailed and admired by a certain swath of listeners, way bigger than just an indie level of success, but probably not even registering as existing to most people. I mean, there were a lot of albums blowing a lot of minds in the late 60s - would it really stand out as a musical historic touchstone vs. Pepper's, Are You Experienced, etc. etc.? How would Brian feel realizing he'd been outpunched not just by the Beatles but by Jefferson Airplane? In the long run it was obviously incredibly beneficial to this album's legend/stature for it to go incomplete, even if that cut it off from contributing, live, to the emergent counterculture.

also for all the unfinished etc myth, when you think about it, most "main" songs were more or less finished (wonderful, vegetables, cabinessence, surf's up... with the notable exception of heroes&villains, of course).
so it's not like there was a lost huge "good vibration" hit or something.

xp - Pet Sounds was a hit record in the UK at the time IIRC

it would've failed imo. the lack of r&b as connective tissue - which was critical to where rock was headed - is just not there in the album, like, at all.

I mean yeah a small cadre (and the British/euros) would've loved it but it would've bombed in the U.S.

yeah, I agree it would have (relatively) failed to become a touchstone of pop.
maybe not because of the lack of r&b since 67 was still heavily psychedelic pop.
personally, I feel it's not really a pop album. it's closer to 20th century classical music like Saint Saens with elements of popular (not pop) music.

yup, agreed that it would have failed. And then the rest of the wilderness-era albums would have been even worse because they couldn't go back to the Smile sessions/songs for material.

I only just realised this but neither Smile 2004 or Smile Sessions has a version of He Gives Speeches/She's Goin Bald; or am I wrong?

― p:s nerds know (dog latin), Thursday, May 21, 2015 4:47 AM (3 hours ago)

it's on the Smile Sessions bonus disc.

maybe not because of the lack of r&b since 67 was still heavily psychedelic pop

that's true, but in America r&b was still at the center whether it was Nuggets-style or SF-style or Dylan or a lot of the LA scene - the blues figured largely in that music and there is zero of that in Smile.

xp

I mean the album just does not "rock" really - apart from a couple genuinely odd moments in Heroes and Villains etc. - and it's too weird and disjointed to function as more easy-listening/AM radio pop

yeah it definitely doesn't rock. and doesn't really pop either !
Hence my idea that it's not really a rock/pop album.
There are many parts and tracks that are not conventional pop songs in structure and instrumentation.
it's very different from Pet sounds or any other albums of that time in that aspect and closer to Saint Saens' "Carnaval des animaux" for instance.

yeah that sounds like why I've had such a hard time with VDP's Song Cycle, but I love Smile : it pops plenty.
this conversation is reminding me though that I don't know how much VDP had to do with the arrangements on Smile, I guess a lot !

really ? I'm not sure VDP had anything to do with the arrangements. wasn't he only involved with the lyrics ?

he had his hands in a lot of places. in his interview with the red bull music academy (lol), vdp said he came up with the cello part in good vibrations. heroes and villains has vdp all over it

yeah i think they worked on the music together, though obviously brian was the one steering the ship.

VDP was also dealing w the Byrds and Mothers of Invention at the same time period, so was probably in and out from time to time.

y'all seem convinced SMiLE would've tanked in the US, but lest we forget "good vibrations" was a billboard #1 (presuming accuracy of whatever source told me as much nearly a decade ago now, apparently the first US #1 to feature electronic instrumentation). it was a massive song. i agree that he had no other obvious hit in the tank, but had brian been able to follow it up in a reasonable timeframe, maybe its momentum would have continued (granted "vibes" came out in october '66, so "reasonable timeframe" is especially hypothetical here) and i don't think it's impossible that in the music market of the late '60s a single edit of "heroes & villains" or "vegetables" could've endeared as some kind of (surprisingly deep) novelty hit. it's not like the beach boys brand needed any introduction at the time, and the '60s were really the last time america had such a ridiculously open-minded market. (also hey, was it at all conventional to put singles on the album at the time? i know "strawberry fields" and "penny lane" weren't on sgt. peppers so i'm guessing not, but if i'm wrong then including "good vibrations" on the album could've helped as well.)

if i were pressed to guess, yes, i'd say it would have failed too, if simply because capitol and brian's own band/family seemed so reluctant to take the thing seriously any further than recording sessions. without a persistent and clever promo campaign, yeah, it wouldn't have worked. but barring that, i don't think this album selling enough to qualify as a hit was out of the question at the time. in the music market of the day it certainly would've sold a shit-ton more than smiley smile or any of their next handful of records, at least until surf's up (which sold in part because it had finished SMiLE material on it, right?).

I suspect that, at the very least, it would have become one of those '60s albums that grew in stature over time, like a 'Forever Changes' or those late '60s Kinks records.

Or Odyssey and Oracle

didn't Forever Changes bomb? those Kinks records didn't even register in the US. Odyssey and Oracle at least had Time of the Season

well I guess Sunny Afternoon did well in the US iirc

SMiLE was VDP's ticket to the career he deserved. seems like he never got over it. but we probably never would've gotten Song Cycle otherwise

the last time I tried to listen to Song Cycle it was just irritating, suppose I should give it a second chance

If you aren't into that, try Discover America.

his voice is just so ugh

Did people really buy LPs in 1968 when Odyssey and Oracle was released? Didn't people mostly buy singles then?

Song Cycle is my favorite album ever. No other single LP comes close. Just absolutely cracked and brilliant from start to finish. Something about the Looney Toons / Warner Brothers arrangements and lysergic menace... VDP's work is baked into my brain, he scored so many cartoons I watched as a kid (esp. The Brave Little Toaster). Song Cycle is the sound of a fading memory you never even experienced...ill stop now. the 33 1/3 book on it is superb.

What are the reference books about Smile ?

his voice is just so ugh

It has this kind of sleepy quality to it that may clash a bit much w the whirlwind hyperactive arrangements on "Song Cycle". I love that album but I've played it for many people I thought would be equally into it and they had the same reaction.

I think "Discover America" is a better use of his voice, with the slower and poppier and far more rhythmic songs, he comes across like a sly pop prankster. And it has way more prominently-featured backup singers.

What are the reference books about Smile ?

Dominic Priore "Look!Listen!Smile!Vibrate!" is the ur-text

Discover America is great but slight compared to Song Cycle. but it's the kind of album that works in pretty much every scenario

I agree that Smile could have been a popular album. It's hard to fathom what its possible influence would have been, though.

Listening to Smiley Smile now... my god does 'Heroes and Villians' sound so wrong without the "cantina" part.

and 'Vegatables' without the 'Mama Says' part, for that matter.

re: references to the pop canon- that sort of thing sounds fresh and creative to us today, but at the time of the original "smile" sessions it really wouldn't have. that era was the apex of the singer-songwriter cult, and to do a record with somebody else's song on it was seen as proof of your lack of creativity. see for instance david crosby's staunch opposition to the byrds doing a goffin-king tune on "notorious byrd brothers"- never mind that "goin' back" is a fabulous song, it just wasn't _credible_ to do that sort of thing. even the word "pastiche" had (has?) more than a whiff of opprobrium to it; it wasn't really until the '80s and guys like grandmaster flash that the situation started to change. the only time you really saw pastiche in those days was in a satirical context (see for instance _absolutely free_ by the mothers of invention, which band van dyke parks was a member of during that era), and wilson's use of pastiche is resolutely non-satirical.

what the public reaction to the record would have been we can't really know, but it is worth noting that good vibrations is "hooky" in a way that really none of the rest of the album was, that "cantina" section or no the released single of "heroes & villains" is reasonably representative of the essence of the song, that hendrix's dismissal of the single as "psychedelic barbershop" would probably not be a uniquely held opinion.

the smiley song that sounds most off-base to me is "wind chimes", lacking the entire "b" section (during the "wild honey" sessions wilson reworked that section into "can't wait too long", one of those songs that evokes "smile" in spirit but not in chronology)

ah damn "can't wait too long," so good

I'm not so convinced having non-singer-songwriter material was such a kiss of death in the mid-Sixties - maybe with a certain crowd, sure, but the Beatles had only just recently stopped having covers on every record, and the folk world was all about covers, the American tradition, etc., etc. This is the Monkees' chart-topping period also, though I doubt that's the audience we're imagining receiving Smile with reverent awe, and of course doing well with the kids would only further alienate the hipsters. It would be a matter of how it was packaged/presented I think.

I guess the point is there are several hypothetical audiences in play - I suspect Smile would have played okay to a subset of the (already diminished number of) American listeners who bought Pet Sounds (which had two solid hits on it), but one assumes it would have offered almost nothing to those who'd preferred Beach Boys Party! So the question is whether he could have carried through the massive, massive popularity off "Good Vibrations," or picked up some new audience of people whose ears pricked up at "Heroes and Villains," and said "woah, wtf is this, I'm freaking out, maan!" or what.

The thing is, very little about most of Smile is really all that much like "Good Vibrations." The recording method of bits and pieces awaiting assembly, yes - - - but actually, this is a really insane way to make pop records, and more to the point, it just so happens to play really well on "Good Vibrations" which is all about this building swell of teenage love, rushing and tumbling through the head and heart - it's an absolutely brilliant fit for this really ambitious train-wreck structure and these varied and gorgeous arrangements, and you can see why that combination of sounds and feelings would strike a chord. It was their biggest hit, ever -- well, "Kokomo" might have ultimately edged it out in sales, I'm not sure -- and yeah, that probably would have helped the album sell to some people. But "Heroes and Villains" is just not that kind of song. The only songs I can think of in this period that approach it for strangeness or narrative non-relatability all rock or at least have a "hard"/dissonant quality (Strawberry Fields, I Can See For Miles, White Rabbit...I dunno). Many aspects of it are headsticky, for sure, and I love its disjointedness, its weirdness, its vaguely sketched narrative.

Maybe that would have been enough! Draw in the right crowd, get them to spend time with the album and discover just how spectacular the inherent deep cuts are. "Surf's Up" would have been a mind-blower in early '67 and I can see the kind of radio station that would soon play Sgt. Pepper's in its entirety getting on board with that. The idea of "Vega-Tables" drawing in a different crowd entirely as just this odd little novely song is kind of plausible too. Oddly though I think their biggest potential "hit" in this period is probably "Gettin' Hungry" (with a very very different arrangement and performance). Maybe "Wild Honey"?

Not putting singles on albums was a British thing, I think?

Nope, I can't think of a single hit potential besides Good Vibrations.

flappy bird, I saw a reddit thread about what movie you could watch over and over again. After some thought I scrolled endlessly down the comments to find Brave Little Toaster. Those songs. I completely forgot it was VDP. But yeah, they were the main reason I picked that movie.

Hang on, "Heroes and Villains" was a hit.

xposts I think the thinking was that if a single was put on an album, people would stop buying the single.

I could have seen Surf's Up being a hit in the wake of God Only Knows.

I could see "Wonderful" cracking the top 20 anyway

I did:

29 Brian Wilson Wonderful Oct 2004

OK, top thirty..

Hang on, "Heroes and Villains" was a hit.

― Mark G, Friday, May 22, 2015 2:49 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Would love to know more about this - Wikipedia just tells me it peaked at #12 in the US (not a major hit by their standards) but not how long it was on the charts, etc.

Not to reset the goalposts, but I suppose with my probing of hitness/hit potential I'm more trying to get at the expectations/hopes/crucial needs Brian Wilson et al. had for this album. I don't think it would have been enough for Smile to eke out #15 on the albums chart or whatever, to be just another album some people maybe bought for a few weeks.

yeah he needed to top Good Vibrations, and that just wasn't going to happen with this other material

ah damn "can't wait too long," so good
might like this song better than anything on smile! holy lord, that intro.

In the UK,

HEROES AND VILLAINS
BEACH BOYS
CAPITOL
Highest position: 08
Weeks on the chart: 09

It's not their biggest hit, granted, but it's up there with the biggest ones.

("I get around" was one place higher and three weeks longer)

In the US Cashbox chart (exclusively sales-based) Heroes and Villains was a #8 / 8 weeks on the chart

Good Vibrations was #1 / 14 weeks

"I Get Around" is highly under-rated and has a killer chorus. "I'm a real cool head/I'm making real cool bread" pretty awesome pre-rap boasting.

p confident that if we polled the Beach Boys singles that would win tbh

of course, only one way to find out...

What are the reference books about Smile ?

Dominic Priore "Look!Listen!Smile!Vibrate!" is the ur-text

Thanks !
As for "Heroes&Villains" I'm surprised it was such a hit. It doesn't seem present at all in the soundtrack of that era...
How did "California girls" and "Wouldn't it be nice" chart, for instance ?

In Cashbox,

California Girls, #3 / 11 weeks
Wouldn't It Be Nice, #7 / 10 weeks*

*b-side God Only Knows charted #38 / 7 weeks

Believe it or not, the BB single that spent the longest time on the Cashbox chart was their 1976 cover of "Rock and Roll Music," at 22 weeks.

crazy that they didn't get to #1 with "California girls" !

Yeah, and that was #3 in Billboard also. The records that kept it down were "I'm Henry VIII, I Am" by Herman's Hermits and "I Got You Babe" by Sonny & Cher

Columnated ruins domino!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

yeah he needed to top Good Vibrations

i know what you mean and it's true (at least had to match it), but you got me thinking: what #1 hit has ever topped "good vibrations?" in terms of arrangement scope, compositional diversity (/cohesion), melodic richness, performative nailed-ness? or opening it up much wider, what top 40 hit in general? the only thing i think comes close is "bohemian rhapsody" (#9 peak on hot 100 originally, #2 in '92), though on these terms i'd put "good vibrations" several notches above

And "Strawberry fields" didn't make it to #1 either !

I voted "Our Prayer". I don't think the Four Freshman songs posted here really get at the appeal of this song. to me it's like a Van Gogh painting: the beauty is in part a function of the desperation, the evident madness, of BW's singing, of his reaching without a clear idea of what's he's reaching for. but BW's reaching is just one vocal, and the others don't seem aware of its particular urgency. BW is hiding in plain sight, doesn't want them to understand what he's expressing (because Mike Love would punch him). so his expression is concealed in a structure the others will recognize and accept, & BW has to coax them into it. Listen to the dialogue on the Smile Sessions: it's nothing serious for Love, BW has to struggle to get him in line, pleading "c'mon", a little voice among the others. it's not "And Your Dream Comes True", "something's not happening". Brian's pleading is so soft. Carl wants to get it right, but doesn't hear it right. "it's not fast enough, Brian": they're catching on to the structure. & then they finish it, only a little reassembling will be needed.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Wow

challops ftw

Has there been a discussion of Brian's 2004 version versus the original 1966 version?

Brian's (and everyone's) vocals are so much better on the '66 version (which is expected), but some of the transitions and how the album unfolds belong, IMO, easily to the 2004 version (thinking mainly 'Cabin Essence' through 'Surf's Up' here — that whole cycle just about brings me to tears it's so good; while the '66 version is also quite good, it just doesn't match the emotional heights the '04 version reaches).

I'm really split on this.

what is challops about surf's up winning? it almost won the beach boys poll

And it's fucking brilliant to boot.

I can take 2004 and leave those old tapes behind. I'd never heard of them before this new SMiLE project had been announced. I think there may have been something about the sonics on the early sessions that I found appealing, but there's more of a chance I'll revisit Brian WIlson's 2004 comeback before looking back to when the train went off the rails or whatever.

That's just insane. The 66 sessions are endless enjoyment for hours and hours. Plus there are edits in the style of 2004 format.

I don't know, like I said, the sequencing on the '04 version is pretty seamless.

what is challops about surf's up winning? it almost won the beach boys poll

― iatee, Sunday, November 8, 2015 1:15 PM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And it's fucking brilliant to boot.

― austinato (Austin), Sunday, November 8, 2015 1:54 PM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It is, but it still seems uncharacteristically pretentious of ILM to pick it so decisively over one of the most mind-blowing pop singles of all time.

Ahh, good point!

I'm not sure I follow that. Like, it wouldn't be pretentious if fewer people preferred it to the single?

maybe pretentious is not the right word, it just seems sort of unpoptimist to pick Surf's Up

'Surf's Up' is not a pop song, structurally speaking, and ilx generally leans towards the established cannon. So, the multi-movement mini-epic song winning out over not one, but two established genuine pop hits is a bit un-ilx-esque. And pretentious because it's a multi-movement mini-epic!

maybe pretentious is not the right word, it just seems sort of unpoptimist to pick Surf's Up

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Sunday, November 8, 2015 11:37 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people interested in voting on late period beach boys album tracks are probably not very poptimist.

It is, but it still seems uncharacteristically pretentious of ILM to pick it so decisively over one of the most mind-blowing pop singles of all time.

Also, don't forget how GV really does feel a bit tacked on here. In a lot of ways, it's the predecessor to the modular songwriting Brian begins to explore on Smile, not the apex of it.

Day in the Life is a dreary bore imo

ok that's challops too, but it's certainly a Serious Work in the same vein as Surf's Up, and in a way that makes it exactly none better than Good Vibrations (or, IDK, In My Life)

also GV is one of the sonic wonders of the world

Well, on the '04 SMiLE, the reprise of 'Our Prayer', for me, ends the album. 'Good Vibrations' is there because it was a part of the sessions and they wanted to include at least one hit on the album. To further the Sgt. Pepper comparisons, even that album had a "throwaway" pop song in 'With a Little Help From My Friends.'

...one of the best "throwaways" in history, but ok.

My point about "A Day In the Life" is that I think "Surf's Up" had the potential to be received on AM radio in a similar way in 1967: as a heavier, more serious and culturally relevant work than the band had heretofore been known.

Would add that nothing about it is either dreary or boring.

Hehe, that's why I throwaways in quotes, cuz y'know.

And I can definitely see it taking off somewhat had it been released at the time.

Yeah and I missed that man alive hit the serious point in his post too. It's late.

Anyway, I'm not knocking GV here. It's unquestionably the perfect marriage of their early sound and what he was attempting with Smile.

Nor are you wrong that Brian was headed in a more ponderous direction. Put another way, had Smile been more like GV in spirit, which is to say less influenced by Brian's LA hipster friends and hangers on, I seriously doubt that Mike Love would have had any problems with it.

I just don't think of GV as Smile. I think of it as a bridge. Possibly the bridge to nowhere...

You = man alive

I have no problem with "serious" and "culturally relevant" pop songs, I just don't think a song should get any extra points for being serious or culturally relevant, it's a net zero effect for me. Meanwhile I think GV is probably the best Beach Boys song period, and possibly one of a handful of all time great radio hit songs, so how it fits in to a record that is kind of a strange mish mosh anyway doesn't really matter to me.

if good vibrations were like surf's up and was a relatively obscure beach boys album track rather than a song that every human being has heard 100000 times, a song that makes you think of sunkist and oldies stations, maybe people would love it more. people vote for their favorite songs, favorites don't exist in a vacuum. if I were voting for one of these songs to be put in a time vault or something, I would vote for good vibrations.

I probably give "Surf's Up" points for being sophisticated, but it's relative. The things that make it sophisticated are manifest in the basic elements of the song - its structure, its harmonic and melodic elements, and its poetry. Any song can score points in those areas in ways that are sophisticated or not. I think if I'm looking at just a basic math when comparing those two songs, it's not like either of them seem to far exceed the other. I would pick "Surf's Up" as my favorite because it feels like it encapsulates that whole album in a song or is something like the climax or denouement of the album (regardless of its placement). Where it gets me the most is where you finally get the title words in the second verse of the second part. It's such a powerful moment, I think, in part because you're reminded of the fact that it's the Beach Boys.

Good Vibrations is also a fairly sophisticated song in a way it gets less credit for. I mean yeah the chord progression, melody and lyrics of Surf's Up are more obviously high arty (and in a successful way), but Good Vibrations is very melodically, rhythmically and sonically daring as a pop song, and has some pretty interesting harmonic and structural things going on too.

For that matter, so is I Get Around. Yeah, they're songs that make you think of soda or the cast of Full House or whatever, but we have these things called ears that allow us to get past those associations if we focus.

who exactly are the people who don't give good vibrations credit? beach boys fans don't hate it - in fact they've generally spent hours of their lives listening to the session tracks - they're just a little sick of it. it is generally regarded as one of the most groundbreaking pop songs of the 60s. are we going to need to defend pet sounds next?

timellison OTM.

It is indeed the centerpiece and the whole cycle of 'Wonderful'—>'Song for Children'—>'Child is the Father'—>'Surf's Up' is like a fucking symphony, if you ask me. The masterful way they did it on the '04 SMiLE really drives that home. There's a moment in 'Child is the Father' ("Easy my child. . .") where you can sing the "my god, my god" part and then the strings introduce the melodic theme (". . .surf's up, mmmhmm. . .) in a minor key right before the proper 'Surf's Up' begins. Then the proper song ends of course with a reprise from 'Child is the Father.' They really nailed it. Truly one of the most affecting pop music moments I've ever come across.

Having a hard time right now thinking of a better way to spend eleven minutes.

"Surf's Up," I think, is more harmonically open, less sort of driven to the dominant or rooted in the tonic. That was certainly a domain that was less explored in pop music. Still is, probably, so yes, it probably gets points for feeling like it's opening doors.

I have a soft spot for that sort of composition. Like hey, let's build up a theme and drive it into the ground as many ways as possible.

Wormholes through music and whatnot.

i too have heard "good vibrations" 10000 times, and it still hasn't lost its ability to surprise and delight me

I blame it on Carol Kaye.

i listened to that whole disc of 'good vibrations' session highlights a little while back and it was delightful. still i get why someone wouldn't vote for it here -- it'd be like voting Like A Rolling Stone in a Hwy 61 poll. obviously a towering, important song, but is it my favorite?

what late great said

I actually have a very salient memory of hearing it for the first time as a small child, on headphones in a children's museum, and even then it blew me away.

What I actually miss most about the 2004 Smile is the wonderful acoustics of those old '60s studios like Western and Gold Star

i listened to that whole disc of 'good vibrations' session highlights a little while back and it was delightful. still i get why someone wouldn't vote for it here -- it'd be like voting Like A Rolling Stone in a Hwy 61 poll. obviously a towering, important song, but is it my favorite?

Actually it would be more like voting for "Strawberry Fields Forever" in a Sgt. Peppers poll.

who exactly are the people who don't give good vibrations credit? beach boys fans don't hate it - in fact they've generally spent hours of their lives listening to the session tracks - they're just a little sick of it. it is generally regarded as one of the most groundbreaking pop songs of the 60s. are we going to need to defend pet sounds next?

I would agree. There is a more than a bit of a straw man argument going on here. "Good Vibrations" was voted the greatest single of all time by Mojo 15 years ago and is easily one of the top 5 in history. I am going to go so far as to say everyone in this thread loves it to pieces.

Austin and timellison both speak very much to reasons I love "Surf's Up." Candidly my favorite version of this has always been the solo piano version with the double tracked vocal from 1966-7. While I miss the incredible "Child" coda, there is such beauty and purity in Brian singing this by himself and power in the dramatic appoggiatura in each verse. It really is an exceptional piece of music.

Interestingly, Priore suggests in his book the possibility that none of what Brian recorded for "Surf's Up"—the instrumental track, piano version, etc.—was actually intended for the final release and that Brian may well have deemed all of it unusable by the time he ditched Smile.

Actually it would be more like voting for "Strawberry Fields Forever" in a Sgt. Peppers poll.
i know what you mean, but "good vibrations" was planned for inclusion on Smile (at least in most accounts and on the printed covers) - the Beatles never thought about putting Strawberry Fields on Sgt Pepper did they?

If Strawberry Fields had been tacked onto Sgt. Peppers, I would totally vote for it. Much better than any of the songs on that record.

Man, I love 'Strawberry Fields', but this whole conversation has kind of made me come to realization: Sgt. Pepper kind of blows in comparison to SMiLE.

OTM

the 2004, or 1966 version? or both?

The '66 version, just because it was a contemporary of SPLHCB.

But, I don't know. The more I listen to Brian's SMiLE, the more I like it.

i know what you mean, but "good vibrations" was planned for inclusion on Smile (at least in most accounts and on the printed covers) - the Beatles never thought about putting Strawberry Fields on Sgt Pepper did they?

Yeah SFF and Penny Lane were both supposed to be on Sgt. Pepper.

oh ha, is that right? i stand corrected, i thought they were always meant to stand alone...
those two really would've made sgt pepper the classic album everyone claims it is!

Well they were the first songs written for the album. Either George Martin or the record company decided to put them out as singles which precluded them from being on the album for one reason or another, I don't exactly remember.

I think they were just the first things recorded in the sessions (followed by A Day In The Life maybe?) and they hadn't put anything out in a while by their standards and so it just became "ehh, put these out." Worked out brilliantly that they complemented each other so well thematically, contrasted so much sonically, etc. But I could be making this up completely.

I've been diving back into this pretty extensively the last few days ... and I gotta say, the real achievement of the 2004 version is that it is tight as a fucking drum. I think if you had asked any fan familiar with the boots the odds that anyone, Brian included, could assemble an even somewhat coherent album out of what had been left behind, I'd say they'd have predicted that those odds were almost nil given the sheer number of open questions -- the "Heroes and Villains" puzzle, sure, but also things like "I Love to Say Da Da" which were little more than backing tracks and all those little instrumental things like "Gee," "Look" and "Holiday." That the final product relied on Brian and VDP digging out old, unrecorded music and lyrics and composing a bit of new stuff answers those questions without really diminishing any of the magic in those original tapes is kind of amazing.

Ten years later, with the box making the context that only obsessives knew for 40 years available to the masses, we can appreciate how utterly unlikely the record was to ever see the light of day -- and how special and important of a work Smile ultimately was. To that end, one of my favorite reviews of this record is from Xgau, who was admittedly no fan of the crumbs that had eked out over the years but a major booster once it was finally assembled:

SMiLE [Nonesuch, 2004]
There are many things I don't miss about the '60s, including long hair, LSD, revolutionary rhetoric, and folkies playing drums. But the affluent optimism that preceded and then secretly pervaded the decade's apocalyptic alienation is a lost treasure of a time when capitalism had so much slack in it that there was no pressing need to stop your mind from wandering. Brian Wilson grokked surfing because it embodied that optimism, and though I considered the legend of Smile hot air back then, this re-creation proves he had plenty more to make of it. The five titles played for minimalist whimsy on Smiley Smile mean even more orchestrated, and the newly released fragments are as strong as the whole songs they tie together. Smile's post-adolescent utopia isn't disfigured by Brian's thickened, soured 62-year-old voice. It's ennobled--the material limitations of its sunny artifice and pretentious tomfoolery acknowledged and joyfully engaged. This can only be tonic for Americans long since browbeaten into lowering their expectations by the rich men who are stealing their money. A+

damn, that's what's up

OTM

Yeah, SFF and Penny Lane were supposed to be on Sgt Pepper but then removed to be released as a double A side single since, at that time, they didn't include their singles on their albums (which I'm not sure is true for their other singles...). G. Martin said later that it was the biggest regret of his life.
it would have been between these two and A Day In The Life for the best track on the album (and that would have made the album much more Lennon oriented).
Just like GV would have been one of the best tracks with Surf's Up on Smile if the album had been released.
I'm not sure I follow the issue, actually !

By the time the old Bring is singing on the a capallea "I've been in this town so long" in 2004 "Heroes & Villains" he has completely won me over w that version.

Still kind of amazed it was released. One of the best records of the 2000s easily.

eh the old Brian

hum. the 2004 Smile is fine and it's good to have an idea of what the album could have been but, although they're unfinished, the original cuts have such an amazing sound and charm.
It's like a psychedelic gershwin musical !
Brian's old voice is a bit sad, to me (even if I agree that it's great that he managed to come back and do all these stuff).
there's a track that is amazing because the music and the backing vocals are from his golden days (around 65) but his voice was recorded in the mid-70s and he goes from his ageing voice to his young falsetto :

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

so touching... a kind of time travel... remembrance of things past !

his voice isn't just a bit sad... it's very sad, and a dealbreaker for me for Smile 2004.

I hadn't listened to SMiLE in any form in a long while, probably because I played the shit out of it and needed a long break.

I put on the 2011 release, which is still great, but it was a little frustrating how it seemed more and more unfinished as it got to the end. So I put on the 2004 reconstruction and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it this time around. Wilson's latter day voice was a real dealbreaker when I first heard it, but maybe I've gotten used to his post-Beach Boys voice having now seen him live on TV numerous times and in concert in 2016. It does hurt a song like "Surf's Up" (the memory of those high notes is too strong), but everywhere else it was actually fine. The 2004 album doesn't replace the 2011 release, but I definitely enjoy it as a polished, finished album.

I remember sometime in the mid-'00s burning a CD that was sort of the best of both worlds, just to have a "finished" but mostly vintage album, using the bootlegs for most of it but bits of the 2004 album to complete a lot of the "missing" parts. IIRC the 2004 harmonies were fine, but except for "Blue Hawaii" (which was unavoidable) I didn't use any of Wilson's isolated lead vocals. It actually worked really well, even with the change in Brian's voice on "Blue Hawaii." I tossed it after I got the 2011 set came out, but I'm tempted to recreate it again now that I have better sources.

I also made a composite out of the two versions, plus the earliest, "most complete" renditions from other sources; since I was combining recordings from 1967 and 2004, I couldn't think of a good reason to exclude the 1969 "Cabinessence" and the 1971 "Surf's Up".
On a few tracks, I tried to layer the two versions in order to capture most of the new lyrics and vocal melodies, which was difficult as some of the songs are performed in slightly different tempos. The 2004 version, weakened as it is for the reasons you mention, does present a highly cogent structure for all of the fragments, without a huge amount of additional extraneous stuff.
In the spirit of anti-climax, my version ends with "You're Welcome" instead of "Good Vibrations".

i do think the 2004 version is the "real" version, but i also like the idea of _artificial_ versions of smile, like the 2004 version wouldn't have existed in 1967 but is "real" and canonical by dint of being finished and being the work of brian and van, so why should we limit ourselves to some hypothetical "would have happened" scenario? do it up _for want of a nail_ style where the whole thing is a production of Kramer Associates for the USM. do a version called _summer fun_ created in an alternate universe where there are flying cars and brian wilson is a trans woman named diane and the whole thing falls apart over the recording of a song about the donner party. (the discord server i run is currently doing a book club for that book, it's fucking rad, y'all should read it).

i got a thing called "heroes and villains: the complete reconstruction", which is 22 minutes long and rules. i got a nightcore version of the beach boys "love you" done before the word "nightcore" was invented. sometime before 2004 i put together a "real" smile version (taking more or less after the prokopy version using the apocryphal track list from the december 1966 back cover) and an alternate view, mostly compiled from random experiments i grabbed from the old "smile shop" message board:

smile promo ad
heroes and vegetables
the elements (fire/i wanna be around/love to say da da/country air)
i'm in great shape (/barnyard/with me tonight/mama says)
heroes and villains part 2
been way too long
can't wait too long

alt whistles (alternate version of "fire" intro)
who ran the iron horse? ('66 acetate "cabinessence")
the grand coulee dam ('66 acetate "cabinessence", conclusion)
surf's up (remix, basically psychedelic with elements of "george fell into his french horn" used as whalesong in part 2 and no "child is father of the man" vox at the end)
with me tonight
he gives speeches
do you dig worms?
cool cool water
you're welcome
brian speaks! (the bit of his appearance at ringo's birthday where he declares van dyke parks "the biggest butthole in the world" - i mean, orange crate art _was_ kind of a dick move, tbf)

the segue from "he gives speeches" into "do you dig worms" is kinda rad actually, i always forget about it

xp I used the 1969 "Cabinessence" and the 1971 "Surf's Up" too - IIRC, I leaned on the officially released stuff, including the previously unreleased stuff included on the 1993 Good Vibrations box set (which is a great box set, still holds up as the best one they've released IMO).

One thing the 2004 version had going for it is that everything feels tighter and performed better (with greater polish and precision). So on a few instrumental sections, I still used the 2004 version even when a bootleg was available because it played better for me.

This may be too much to post, but going by memory...

1. "Our Prayer/Gee" was from the 1993 box set. But the trombone segue sounded better to me on the 2004 album (it sounded almost trumpet-like)...couldn't use every bit of it due to the crossfade into the "Heroes and Villains," so I basically started with the 2004 horn, then as it plays the last elongated note, crossfaded it into the 1993 track of the same horn note. It actually was kind of cool how the tonality changed with that crossfade. Then I overlapped this on to the beginning of "Heroes and Villains."
2. "Heroes and Villains" mostly the alternate version from the 1993 box set, but I remember needing a section from the single version to match what was on the 2004 album.
3. "Roll Plymouth Rock" (aka "Do You Like Worms?") I think this was on the 1993 set, in which case I took that recording then spliced in the verse parts from the 2004 album since those lyrics didn't exist then.
4/5. "Barnyard," "Old Master Painter," "You Are My Sunshine" were probably bootlegs, unreleased back then.
6. "Cabin Essence" the 1969 release found on the 1993 set
7. "Wonderful" also from the 1993 set
8. "Song for Children" - the opening (which segued in from "Wonderful") was from the then-still-unreleased boot, but when the tempo picks up, I actually used the 2004 set. I remember the boot sounding a bit off in the performance, and the weird tap-dance-like break felt like a misguided choice that wasn't in the 2004 version.
9. "Child Is Father of the Man" the bootleg (unlike "Roll Plymouth Rock," the new 2004 verses were sung by Brian alone, and I wanted to avoid that as much as possible so I didn't splice them in.) The ending segue came from the 2004 album though.
10. "Surf's Up" the 1971 version
11. "I'm in Great Shape/I Wanna Be Around/Workshop" - bootleg
12. "Vegetables" opening segue may have been flow in from the 2004 album. But the track was mostly the 1993 set...but I remember doing a few major edits to it. Too complicated to recall the sources, but I remember where I did the edits due to some nice details that popped out (like a whistle shooting up on one edit and needing to overlap one section before an edit with a sped up a capella part).
13. "Holiday" was mostly the bootlegs, but I think I took the slow outro from the 2004 set where the harmonies sounded better - really sounded gorgeous as a better recording. Doing so also brought in the segue that was needed too.
14. "Wind Chimes" was the 1993 track. I remember editing it to the opening segue on a bass note that sounded DEEP. The "doo doo doo-ya doo doo" part on the back end came from the 2004 album - I remember making the edit somewhere in the piano break, and it was cool how the sound of piano notes changed with that edit.
15. "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" was mainly from the 2004 album because the vintage recording sounded less intense and less energetic than the 2004 recording. But I think the opening may have been taken from a vintage recording from the 1993 set.
16. "In Blue Hawaii" was from the 2004 album because the album wouldn't sound finished any other way. Then I closed with "Our Prayer" from the 1993 set, but I used the whole version (minus "Gee") because I gave the album complete, symmetric closure that way. I didn't think "Good Vibrations" was essential, it was more like a really great footnote or bonus.
17. "Good Vibrations" but from the DCC gold CD of Endless Summer because they fade out later and I like that extra bit.
18. after 20 seconds, "You're Welcome," which kind of played like a hidden track à la Sgt. Pepper's runout groove.

"the best of both worlds, just to have a 'finished' but mostly vintage album"

This is the way to do it!

I played the shit out of the 2004 recording and now the original bootlegs sound wrong to me!

I think I value the unity over the singing quality, I guess. What I really miss is the reverb/echo

Do you like the 2004 versions of "Cabinessence" and "Surf's Up" better than the 1969/71 recordings?

In the context of the record, yeah, I prefer it. If I was just gonna play the isolated track, I'd 100% chose the old one

One of the nice things about the re-recording is how it doesn't sound egregiously modern. I guess using one of the studios Brian preferred back in the day helps (the acoustics are probably very close if not exactly the same as they were before), but also having the same echo chamber(s) intact and a vintage tube console makes a huge difference. There is noticeably less echo on the vocals, but with Brian's current voice, it feels like the better choice - it's like their owning the fact that it's not the same voice anymore rather than trying to unsuccessfully hide it by burying it in reverb.

yes---I too wanted to make a 60s-'04 Smile, though I didn't think it out like yall did, I just wanted to put thee olde Boys vocals around latter-day Brian, in most cases, or maybe leave Wonder Mints audible as supporting harmonists in some cases, with Carl & co. up front (but benefiting from '04 singers' skills).
The main thing about the Nonesuch album was that I felt I really got Brian's original intention, or maybe it was there more (consciously, specifically) as he and Parks finished it: that he was struggling, and his subject was that struggle, with American fantasy, all the stuff that a middle class white kid in 50s-60s suburban Southern California (among others) might find his head fed with, by himself and others, as he looks back across the West, for instance (Wilsons prev from Illinois), and out in projection and refraction to "Blue Hawaii" (also title of an Elvis movie). And the voice! As I wrote at the time, "He's the Old Boy In The Bubble, he just keeps rollin' along."
Thought of this again when I recently read one of Joan Diddion's late works, Where I Was From, past tense because she's come to realize and struggle with her own California Children of the Pioneers mythos, of Rugged Individualism in an artificial paradise of water and land politics, plugged into and dependent on Big Gov in a lot of ways, like Cold War military contracts supporting your little town, blank check even, for quite a while, 'til after the gold rush--)
Oh yeah, the Nonesuch Smile does give me a lot of different facets to play with, like this 2004 interpretation reminded me of Brian saying that "Good Vibrations" came from something his mother told him, regular grassroots wisdom from way before the hippie era, another part of the heritage, like folk remedies (if COVID had showed up earlier, would have had some of the same solutions)(thinking of some groovy friends' parents now too)

Which associations don't mean that his Mom was wrong!

I'm conditioned because I've lived so long with the '71 edit of "Surf's Up", but no matter how correct it actually is, having "Child Is..." as a separate track placed <before> "Surf's Up" just feels totally wrong to me.

Also: recently I was listening to the '70s Reprise vinyl edition of 20/20 and had 'a moment' with "Cabinessence" sounding so massive even over my bookshelf speakers, sitting there slack-jawed contemplating how mere mortal human beings made this, achieving those sounds--it still feels like it was made tomorrow.

Wow, I would love to hear some of these assembly edits. I love the completed Wondermints version (and saw the tour, which brought me to tears a few times) but there is such electricity and magic in the original vocals that I miss them despite the Wondermints' great talents.

Also: recently I was listening to the '70s Reprise vinyl edition of 20/20 and had 'a moment' with "Cabinessence" sounding so massive even over my bookshelf speakers, sitting there slack-jawed contemplating how mere mortal human beings made this, achieving those sounds--it still feels like it was made tomorrow.

I listened to Smile for the first time in years a couple weeks ago and was struck by how the effect of the Who Ran the Iron Horse section, especially between the cello and fuzz base, sounds almost like a synth.

xp If the original vocals still existed on isolated tracks, it would have been cool if they had recorded the 2004 album around them.

i also like the idea of _artificial_ versions of smile, like the 2004 version wouldn't have existed in 1967 but is "real" and canonical by dint of being finished and being the work of brian and van, so why should we limit ourselves to some hypothetical "would have happened" scenario?

^gets it

a 60s-‘04 Smile

That’s what the 2011 Smile basically already is, ffs

need to know more about this nightcore “Love You”

found it referenced on RYM, mediafire link is still active:

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?1tnjnyqcomm

Never had one download automatically before.

a 60s-‘04 Smile

Wiki:

It features comprehensive session highlights and outtakes, as well as an approximation of what the completed album might have sounded like, using the 2004 version as a model.

nah it's all '66-'67 recordings, there _are_ fan reconstructions using a combo of them for the unfinished tracks (like In Blue Hawaii) but the official release is all vintage

if you search "soniclovenoize smile" it turns up a triple disc fan compilation which offers how it might have been in 67, an assembly of original sessions conformed to the 2004 Wondermints version, and a disc of reconstructed tracks. The second disc is *amazing*, better than the other reconstructions I've heard. The link is missing from the main post but lossy and lossless reuploads are linked in the comments.

this is that: http://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-beach-boys-smile-upgrade.html

and here's the liner notes for the second disc: http://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-beach-boys-smile-2004.html

I thought of this guy when I first saw "reconstruction," but knew that all his links had vanished a while back. And the ones I found in comments on this 'un lead to The account that created this link has been terminated due to multiple violations of our Terms of Service. Just like his others, but I already had most of what I wanted.

I used the mega nz one, a few days ago, worked fine; I hope I didn't break it!

there's some more recent links in the comments that still work yeah

Hum I couldn’t find a working link for the 67 reconstruction

http://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-beach-boys-smile-upgrade.html?showComment=1646491845433#c5694448617647941503

Got it, thanks !

This is the one that they say Darian used as a reference for the 2004 release. It kicks ass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMJ-asYwzYU

This is the one I listen to the most. It adds in cool dialog from the sessions and stuff.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1S-J-pVPCbsmJHxTPrCH6h-Pmcjv52hpS

all four parts of the "purple chick" mix are on yt that's just part one above

The entire Beautiful Dreamer documentary is apparently on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SriaRRcA6w

Surprised we don't have a dedicated thread for "Smile" other than this.

Anyway, I came here to say the 2004 Brian Wilson is the definitive version

cosign, there's a certain mystique to "unfinished works" but there's this idealist counterfactual narrative. wilson and parks finished smile. that is the album. whether or not it _would_ have been the album in 1967 doesn't matter. obviously the '66-'67 recordings have _value_, they're _great_, but the album literally exists and the stuff on the smile sessions box isn't the album.

2004 doesnt have the otherworldly alien feel like the og sessions do

that's true. i own the box, i listen to the original recording sessions, honestly, i probably listen to fragments of the original sessions more often than i listen to the completed album. i guess what gets me is when people try to speculate about the "real album". i mean there is a certain sense of, i mean, to me it's not like wilson and parks just threw everything they had into it. it's a record from a long time ago, some other folks who had the bootlegs put them together and played around with things and eventually came up with something that wilson and parks could look at and say "yeah, ok, we can release that". if the '66-'67 sessions are a result of a singular vision, well, two singular visions maybe, the 2004 record isn't that. but insomuch as there is a "real album", that's it.

doing what the _smile sessions_ box does, taking all the tracks that they re-recorded for the 2004 set and sequencing them in their unfinished form, i mean, it's interesting but it's hugely anachronistic. and i guess to me that's the disappointing thing, the extent to which the "fan mixes" since 2004 seem like just different ways of putting the stuff used in the 2004 mixes together. i like fucking around, you know, just doing weird shit. somebody put together a mix of "heroes and vaillans" that's more than 20 minutes long. back before the record came out, you know, everybody was trying to fit things into the format of that random-ass tracklist full of songs that didn't actually exist. i did a version with an edit of "country air" in there, it's anachronistic sure but i still think it sounds good.

idk maybe people are still fucking around and i'm just not plugged in to how it's going, or maybe, you know, it was just a limited time thing

i haven't read _glimpses_ but i have read _summer fun_, fall of '22, it was a dark, traumatizing read. _smile_ has always been a bit of a fucked vibe. a lot of it is my memory of, in 2000, playing "holidays" for this girl i was at the new jersey shore with, super fucked situation, and her saying it was really sad music that sounded like it was trying really hard to be happy. anyway, yeah, i mean ultimately if you're going to do riff on _smile_ you can change it around quite a lot. shit, why not do that, fuck around with the _smile_ backing tracks, add and remove shit until you have something that approximates the way _summer fun_ is described in the book. that would be interesting. because there aren't any _lyrics_ to _summer fun_, they weren't recorded. it was all backing tracks.

some other folks who had the bootlegs put them together and played around with things and eventually came up with something that wilson and parks could look at and say "yeah, ok, we can release that". if the '66-'67 sessions are a result of a singular vision, well, two singular visions maybe, the 2004 record isn't that.

idk BriWi seems to have had some intentions, particularly regarding how the modules fit together, that eluded the nerds and bootleggers for decades. it's revelatory. certain movements and passages that feel very disconnected and fragmentary in fan mixes suddenly cohere.

it's also, yes, anachronistic. it's interesting that where the Beach Boys revisited and developed (or curtailed) that material in the 70's, , he seems to regard those later versions as definitive. so you get the abridged Surf's Up, and he insists on using the "Cool Cool Water" intro for "Love to say dada". iirc the 3 movement structure is a modern reconstruction.

it's a real mixture of intentions that are native to the original sessions, but that nobody who heard the recordings had a clue about. some songs that Carl & the Beach Boys reworked and completed in the 70's that are sort of frozen in that period, and then some additional material that was created for the 2004 release, and some new perspectives.

In Sahanaja's recollection, "He'd be saying, 'Oh yeah, that's supposed to be a part of this song,' or 'Use that bit to connect these two songs here,' and it was really neat."[30] However, on another occasion, Sahanaja said that Wilson did not assert his original ideas for the album: "Brian Wilson is not going to tell you in October/November of 2003, 'No, this was supposed to be like this.'

it was really sad music that sounded like it was trying really hard to be happy

girl you were at the jersey shore with otm

The SMiLE Cabinessence vs the Smiley one is the one of the most o_O ?! choices in their career up there with Hey Little School Girl and Problem Child. The Smiley one is SO BAD. The og one is one of the best things ever produced by a human.

can’t remember what the 2004 one sounds like… the og/sea of tunes stuff is so fused into my mind

"CabinEssence" isn't on Smiley Smile, and the 20/20 version seems to be simply the original track with lead vocals overdubbed?

I'd say "Wind Chimes" is the most boldest Smiley Smile remake, and "Wonderful" the least successful. Never really liked "VegeTables" in any version.

The Smiley version of « wonderful » is sabotage

i'd love to hear a smiley smile version of cabinessence

the first times i heard Cabinessence were on a bootleg without the lead vocals and i imagined the prominent "doing! doing! doing!" vocals being sung by cartoon squirrels or beavers. the looney stuff connected with me most at that time and i always loved Vegatables. "if you brought a big brown bag of them home, i'd jump up and down and hope you'd toss me a carrot" !!! i mean come on

the thing about the sessions that the finished album with 3 movements kind of disguises imo is how Brian's ideation of the album evolves over the course of the dates, how the kind of album he wants to make is a rapidly moving target and he pivots when he gets excited about a new direction or theme. and like splitting it into 3 movements where the whole thing has this very moving emotional arc that wasn't apparent before, it just makes the constant readjustments seem very deliberate, like there was this master plan all along. and it's much more clear on the stack o tracks that this wasn't the case.

iow i think on the old bootlegs there's a sense that Brian can't keep up with the album itself, that it's overpowering him in quite a sinister way, that it has its own animus that can't be tamed and it's quite dangerous. and like, now we've harnessed that and we're in control of what it does, even though it feels like playing with fire at times

no pun intended

like i wondering if the 2004 version is definitive why the 2011 one is ultimately more satisfying in some way and maybe it's cause that one retains more of the sense of playing with fire, like this is some potent shit that we've revived and are messing with

like i don't wanna lump the sessions in the "the mystique of unfinished works" because there are unfinished works that just feel aborted or half baked, and this feels like it got the better of its composer and ate him alive?

Brian can't keep up with the album itself

Definitely. Even the way he keeps juggling the "bicycle rider" theme in different keys, tempi and arrangements suggest a kind of obsessive tinkering when you hear it in a dozen different places in the sessions tapes.

...and he kept at it until he wrote "Can't Wait Too Long", maybe my favourite Beach Boys song of all.

love this reading, Deflatormouse. and I'm a fan of the 2004 one! not sure I've ever heard the 2011 one. hmm.

transition from the huge 2011 mix O'Leary's Cow with 'Fall Breaks' vocals into Cool Cool Water intro is this moment of tremendous psychic relief that Love to Say Dada in its original form never achieved- deeply healing, the most satisfying possible resolution to everything that's come before. And then it goes abruptly into unfinished 'Love to Say DAda' without the "Blue Hawaii" stuff, the album once again has the upper hand and it undermines the resolution, it's just a deeply unsettling note to end the third act on.

2004 Smile doesn't give me that.

feel like I've read at least two Brian Wilson books but I can't remember anything about why The Old Master Painter? Is Brian Wilson the inventor of interpolation? And I could guess, but why The Old Master Painter?