Best track on the Beach Boys' SMiLE

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.