Best track on the Beach Boys' SMiLE

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.