Best track on the Beach Boys' SMiLE

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

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― 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

"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?