Smile (The Beach Boys album)

For the 2011 release of the surviving Smile recordings, see The Smile Sessions.

Smile (occasionally typeset with partial capitalization as SMiLE) is a partially recorded concept album by the Beach Boys originally intended to be the follow-up album to Pet Sounds. The Beach Boys' main song-writer Brian Wilson abandoned large portions of music recorded from May 1966 to May 1967 and the group recorded new versions of the songs for the Smiley Smile album in its place. Several of the original tracks eventually found their way onto subsequent Beach Boys albums. During the years Smile remained mostly unavailable, it became famous as one of pop music's legendary milestones.

Untitled

The project was re-imagined and released by Wilson in 2004 as Brian Wilson Presents Smile though Wilson has stated that the Smile of 2004 differed substantially from what the Smile of the mid-1960s might have been. During the 37 years from its cancellation to the release of Wilson's version Smile had acquired considerable mystique: bootlegged tracks from the album circulated widely among Beach Boys collectors.

On October 31, 2011 The Smile Sessions was released, an approximation of what the completed album might have sounded like, the first disc largely following the template of the 2004 Brian Wilson album. Along with this a sequence of completed surviving recordings, along with many unreleased session highlights and outtakes were made available through a box set. It received unanimous critical acclaim. In 2012 it was ranked number 381 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. In 2013, it won the Best Historical Album award at the 55th Grammy Awards.

Conception

Van Dyke Parks in 1967

The genesis of Smile was during the recording of Pet Sounds. On February 17, 1966, during the sessions for that album, Brian Wilson started work on a new single, "Good Vibrations". Seventeen recording sessions took place over four studios at a cost exceeding $50,000, making "Good Vibrations" the most expensive single of its time. It was created by an unprecedented recording technique: nearly 30 minutes of separate musical sections were recorded, spliced together and reduced into a three-minute pop song. The song quickly became the band's biggest international hit yet, rising to number one in over half a dozen countries including Britain and the United States. Smile was intended to be produced in a similar fashion.

Crucial to the inception and creation of Smile was Wilson's meeting with musician Van Dyke Parks in February 1966. They had been introduced to each other by mutual friends David Crosby and Terry Melcher, and Parks would often visit Wilson's home while he was working on Pet Sounds. When Wilson realized that Parks had an unusually elastic manner of speaking, he asked him if he could write lyrics for "Good Vibrations". Parks declined for the reason that he thought there was nothing he could add to the track.

In October 1966 interviews, Brian Wilson stated that the Beach Boys' next project was to be "a teenage symphony to God," and that, "It will be as much an improvement over [Pet] Sounds as that was over Summer Days." The project was to have been an album-length suite of songs that were both thematically and musically linked, recorded using the unusual sounds and innovative production techniques that had contributed to the success of "Good Vibrations".

Wilson invited Parks to write lyrics for the new album in the second quarter of 1966 when the project was provisionally called Dumb Angel. This time Parks agreed and the two quickly formed a close and fruitful working relationship. In preparation for the writing and recording of the album, Wilson purchased several thousand dollars' worth of marijuana and hashish. In addition, Wilson famously installed a hotboxing tent in his home and relocated a grand piano to a sandbox in his living room.

Original themes and ideas

We just kind of wanted to investigate…American images.…Everyone was hung up and obsessed with everything totally British. So we decided to take a gauche route that we took, which was to explore American slang, and that’s what we got.

— Van Dyke Parks, 2005

Several key features of Smile are generally acknowledged: both musically and lyrically: Wilson and Parks intended Smile to be explicitly American in style and subject, a reaction to the overwhelming British dominance of popular music at the time. It was supposedly conceived as a musical journey across America from east to west, beginning at Plymouth Rock and ending in Hawaii, traversing some of the great themes of modern American history and culture including the impact of white settlement on native Americans, the influence of the Spanish, the Wild West and the opening up of the country by railroad and highway.

The Act of Creation, by Arthur Koestler turned me on to some very special things…it explains that people attach their egos to their sense of humor before anything else. After I read it, I saw that trait in many people…a sense of humor is important to understanding what kind of person someone is. Studying metaphysics was also crucial, but Koestler’s book really was the big one for me.

— Brian Wilson, 2005

It was around this period that Brian Wilson read Arthur Koestler's book, The Act of Creation. The book had a profound effect on him that carried onto the Smile project, specifically the human logistics of laughter. As a consequence, the Smile songs are replete with word play, puns and double entendres. One example is "Vega-Tables", which includes the lines "…I'm gonna do well, my vegetables, cart off and sell my vegetables…"; the phrase "…cart off and…" is a bilingual pun on the word Kartoffeln, which is German for potatoes. At one stage, Wilson apparently toyed with the idea of devoting Smile as a comedy album and a number of scrapped recordings were made in this vein. The idea is evident on the Smiley Smile track "She's Goin' Bald", a reworking of an earlier Smile track known as "He Gives Speeches".

Smile also drew heavily on American popular music of the past; Wilson's original compositions were interwoven with snippets of significant songs of yesteryear including "The Old Master Painter" (made famous by Peggy Lee), the perennial "You Are My Sunshine", Johnny Mercer's jazz standard "I Wanna Be Around" (recorded by Tony Bennett), "Gee" by the 1950s doo-wop group the Crows and quotations from other pop-culture reference points such as the Woody Woodpecker theme and "Twelfth Street Rag".

Wilson's experiments with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) were undoubtedly a significant influence on the texture and structure of the work, and another influence on his thinking at this time was his friend Loren Schwartz. He is said to have introduced Brian to marijuana toward the end of 1964 and LSD in the middle of 1965. Writer Bill Tobelman speculated that Smile is filled with coded references to Brian's life and his recent LSD experiences (a presumed Lake Arrowhead, California "trip" being the most important). He also argues that it was influenced by Wilson's interest in Zen—notably in its use of absurd humor and paradoxical riddles (koans) to liberate awareness from the mind—and that Smile as a whole can be interpreted as an extended Zen koan. Although Wilson often professed that he was attempting to create a new "white spiritual sound" and move into religious music, he later denied that Smile was religiously influenced.

Recording process

Between April and September 1966 Wilson and Parks co-wrote a number of songs in the sandbox. Of these, they were "Surf's Up", "Heroes and Villains", "Wonderful", "Cabin Essence" and "Wind Chimes". Wilson removed the sandbox installation once he realized his pets were using it as a litter box.

Recording for the new LP—now officially named Smile—began in August 1966 and continued in earnest until mid-December. Conflicts arose around this time, temporarily halting work on the album, although sessions resumed in January and continued through the first few months of 1967.

Studio techniques

Further information: History of multitrack recording and Pet Sounds

Brian Wilson honed his atypical production methods over several years. In 1962, it was common for pop music to be recorded in a single take but the Beach Boys' approach differed. Using multitrack technology, elements such as backing vocals and guitar solos were often recorded independently and would later be combined to the basic track. From 1964 onward Wilson also began to physically edit tape to craft his recordings, initially this allowed short, hard-to-sing vocal sections to be recorded and then attached via sticky tape to the beginnings or endings of songs. By the time of the Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) album in 1965, Wilson was becoming more adventurous in his use of tape splicing. An example is the a cappella track "And Your Dream Comes True", which was recorded in sections and then carefully edited together to create the final song.

With "Good Vibrations", Wilson took this modular approach to recording further, experimenting with compiling the finished track by editing together the numerous sections from multiple versions recorded at the lengthy tracking sessions. Instead of taping each backing track as a more-or-less complete performance—as had been the model for previous Beach Boys recordings—he split the arrangement into sections, recording multiple takes of each section and developing and changing the arrangements and the production as the sessions proceeded. He sometimes recorded the same section at several different studios, to exploit the unique sonic characteristics or special effects available in each. Then, he selected the best performances of each section and edited these together to create a composite which combined the best features of production and performance. The resulting final mix broke new ground in popular recording, since each section of the song was presented in its own distinct sonic 'envelope', rather than the homogeneous production sound of a conventional "one take" studio recording. The cut-up structure and heavily edited production style of Smile was unique for its time in mainstream popular music, and it suggests that Brian was aware of the techniques of musique concrète and the usage of chance operations in making art.

Wilson continued these patterns with the songs on Smile, working mainly at United Western Recorders with engineer Chuck Britz and sometimes Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles. He also used Sunset Sound Studios and Columbia Studios on Sunset Boulevard. The vocal sessions for Smile were usually done at Columbia, which had the only 8-track audio recorder available amongst the major recording studios at the time. From August 1966, he began a long and complex series of sessions—approximately 50 overall, discounting the 17 sessions needed for Good Vibrations—that continued until May 1967.

Although stereo recording was increasingly popular, Wilson always made his final mixes in mono, as did rival producer Phil Spector. Wilson did so for several reasons—he personally felt that mono mixing provided more sonic control over what the listener heard, minimizing the vagaries of speaker placement and sound system quality. It was also motivated by the knowledge that pop radio broadcast in mono, and most domestic and car radios and record players were monophonic. Another more personal reason for Wilson's preference was deafness in his right ear.

Tracks and sequencing

See also: Our Prayer, Heroes and Villains, Do You Like Worms?, Cabin Essence, Wonderful (The Beach Boys song), Look (The Beach Boys song), Child Is Father of the Man, Surf's Up (song), Vega-Tables, Wind Chimes (song), Love to Say Dada, and The Elements: Fire

The most ambiguous and least realized parts of the 1966 Smile concept was its ambitious narrative, length, track listing, and track order. The material recorded was set to be divided into a then-undecided number of musical suites or movements. Brian Wilson has stated that the exact running order was not decided in 1967 and that the original Smile would have been "less uplifting" than his finished 2004 version. He also claimed that he and Van Dyke Parks had originally thought of the album as a two-movement rock opera.

The 2011 release of the The Smile Sessions compilation proved conclusively that virtually all the musical "components" used to create Wilson's 2004 version of Smile are present in one form or another among the original 1967 recordings. However, the original track listing and running order were not established until 2004. Given the technical limitations of record production in 1967 and the sheer bulk of material that was being recorded, Wilson recorded far more music than could possibly have fit on one LP. At the time, the album was only ever envisaged as being a single LP. The intended track order and arrangement of the various songs, segments, and link pieces as of 1966 have remained either inconclusive or forgotten among the people involved.

"Heroes and Villains" was the ultimate keystone for the musical structure of the album, and the considerable time and effort that Wilson devoted to it is indicative of its importance, both as a single and as part of the Smile narrative. Like "Good Vibrations", it was edited together from many discrete sections. The complexity of Wilson's production at this time can be gauged by the sheer bulk of session material that has survived—more than 60 tracks in the five-CD The Smile Sessions boxed set are session recordings for "Heroes and Villains"—and most individual tracks on Smile—including "Do You Like Worms?", "I'm In Great Shape", "Vega-Tables", "Love to Say Dada", "He Gives Speeches", "Cabin Essence", and "My Only Sunshine"—were composed as potential sections for the "Heroes and Villains" track. Sessions for the various versions and sections extended from May 1966 to July 1967; there are dozens of takes spanning each section of the song, multiple versions of both the variant sections, and the various attempted final mixes.

The other centerpiece was to be "Surf's Up," which had been for many years perceived as the intended ending climax of Smile.

Smile was presented as three complete movements for Brian Wilson Presents Smile and The Smile Sessions. The first movement was realized as a representation of early Americana, from Plymouth Rock to the Old West, farmlands, and the industrial revolution. The second explored familial-themed concepts such as the human life cycle and familial generations.

"The Elements" suite

"The Elements" was a reputed movement which encompassed the four classical elements: Air, Fire, Earth, and Water.

"Fire" is the only surviving recording that is certain to have been part of any specific movement on the Smile album. The idea of songs based on classical elements would later be revisited on "Cool, Cool Water", initially conceived as "Love to Say Dada". For Brian Wilson presents Smile, "The Elements" was placed as the third suite, and the other missing components were filled in by "Vega-Tables" (Earth) and "Wind Chimes" (Air). "Love to Say Dada" lost its childhood themed origin and was instead repurposed as "In Blue Hawaii" (Water).

Other leftover fragments

"Good Vibrations" was completed by Brian Wilson before the original recording sessions and released in October just as the sessions were getting underway. All of the other tracks were either not recorded or only exist in part-completed form, and many Smile-era recordings lack their full vocal arrangements, lyrics and melodies. Many of the shorter tracks, along with many other brief instrumental and vocal pieces, were evidently intended to serve as bridging sections that would have been edited in to provide links between the major songs.

"Holidays" was recorded as an oblique instrumental in mid-1966, and re-recorded with vocals for Brian Wilson Presents Smile as "On A Holiday". "I'm in Great Shape", "My Only Sunshine / The Old Master Painter", and the original "Vega-Tables" only existed as small fragments of tracks, and their complete structure hadn't been finalized. "You're Welcome" is a short chant sung by the Beach Boys over a thumpy background track featuring a glockenspiel and a timpani. The only lyrics are "Well / you're well / you're welcome to come". It was released as the B-side to the 1967 "Heroes and Villains" single.

Various surreal comedy skits were recorded during the sessions as part of a "Psycodelic [sic] Sounds" series. Among these include "Brian Falls Into A Piano", "Brian Falls into a Microphone", "Moaning Laughing", and "Underwater Chant". An unused skit was also recorded by Brian Wilson with session drummer Hal Blaine to promote a then-proposed "Vega-Tables" single release.

The other Wilson brothers experimented with their own compositions in between sessions for the Smile album. Of these, instrumental tracks labelled "I Don't Know" (by Dennis Wilson) and "Tune X" (by Carl Wilson) have survived.

Initial promotion and album readying

Capitol began production on a lavish gatefold cover with a 12-page booklet in December. Cover artwork was commissioned from Frank Holmes, a friend of Van Dyke Parks, and color photographs of the group were taken by Guy Webster. Frank Holmes also drew various other visual interpretations of individual Smile tracks based upon Parks' lyrics.

466,000 covers and 419,000 booklets were printed by early January 1967; with the following tracks listed on the back of the cover as per a handwritten note delivered to them a few weeks prior to Christmas:

• "Do You Like Worms?"
• "Wind Chimes"
• "Heroes and Villains"
• "Surf's Up"
• "Good Vibrations"
• "Cabin Essence"

• "Wonderful"
• "I'm in Great Shape"
• "Child Is Father of the Man"
• "The Elements"
• "Vega-Tables"
• "The Old Master Painter"

This list was long considered crucial evidence of Wilson's intentions for the piece, but in 2006 it was discovered Brian had never seen it before. A comparison of the handwriting indicates that it may have been written by Carl Wilson, or possibly Brian's sister-in-law, Diane Rovell.

The Beach Boys were written about and interviewed extensively during the Smile era—band member Dennis Wilson famously confessed to a reporter on November 7 1966: "In my opinion it makes Pet Sounds stink - that's how good it is!". The project was notably covered by Julies Siegel, who chronicled the band in a 1967-published article for Rolling Stone entitled Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!.

File:Brianonleonardbernstein.jpg

Brian Wilson as he appeared in December 1966 performing "Surf's Up" on Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution.

In November 1966, Brian Wilson was filmed performing a complete 'demo' solo version of "Surf's Up" on piano for a CBS News special on popular music: Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution. The show was hosted by Leonard Bernstein, but it was the show's producer, David Oppenheim, who expressed his admiration for the song through voice-over, describing it as "poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity. 'Surf's Up' is one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future." Although he was filmed in late 1966, the special was not be aired until several months later.

The month after filming for CBS, the KRLA Beat magazine published a surreal vegetable-themed psychedelic piece written by Wilson. The story described the experiences of "Brian Gemini" as he encountered various characters lurking within the "Vegetable Forest", a few of which were based upon real-life acquaintances David Anderle, Hal Blaine, and Michael Vosse.

Some time in December, Brian informed Capitol that Smile would not be ready that month, but he advised that he would deliver it "prior to January 15". Capitol continued sending promotional materials to record distributors and dealers, and ads were placed in Billboard and teenage magazines including Teen Set. Within these ads, the album had been compared as an artistic achievement to the films Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Capitol also readied a radio ad, using "Good Vibrations" as the backdrop against a voice-over reciting the album's promotional tagline, "With a happy album cover, the really happy sounds inside, and a happy in-store display piece, you can't miss! We're sure to sell a million units... in January!" Wilson's conception of the work evidently changed around this time.

Project collapse

Brian Wilson began to encounter serious problems with Smile around late November 1966. Despite having exhibited varying signs of poor mental health up to this point, notably at the end of 1964 where he suffered a nervous breakdown on a flight to Houston, by late 1966 Brian was becoming increasingly fragile and began exhibiting consistent signs of depression and paranoia. After several months of internal conflict and only a few weeks before the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, the Beach Boys' press officer Derek Taylor announced to the British press on May 6, 1967 that the Smile project had been shelved, and that the album would not be released.

Brian Wilson's emotional instability and substance abuse

By the beginning of 1967, Brian's behavior became increasingly erratic, and his use of drugs escalated. While his actions were a concern for some of his friends and stories of his sometimes bizarre "off-duty" behavior became the stuff of legend, the session musicians who worked with him during this period have stated that he was totally professional in the studio.

We started to get indications that Brian was taking some hallucinogens, like LSD and stuff like that—a lot of the writers were doing that at the time—but it took a tremendous toll from him. He drove me around the parking lot of William Morris about twenty times, explaining to me about this great trip he had just taken, and I just wanted to be as far away from that as possible! Because I didn’t want to know about it—I wanted the innocence!

— Al Jardine, 1998

Following the recording session for the "Fire" section of the "Elements Suite" at Gold Star Studios on November 28, Brian became irrationally concerned that the music had been responsible for starting several fires in the neighborhood of the studio. Wilson falsely claimed for many years that he had burned these session tapes, but that was not the case, although he did abandon the "Fire" piece for good. It has also been noted that Parks deliberately stayed away from the session—during which Wilson encouraged the musicians to wear toy firemen hats—and that he later described Brian's behavior as "regressive", something which band mates also noted during and after this session.

David Anderle was head of the Beach Boys’ label Brother Records during the period when Brian Wilson was working on the Smile album. Anderle painted a portrait of Wilson, which reportedly frightened him when he saw it, convinced that Anderle had somehow captured his soul on canvas. Anderle would go on to tell Rolling Stone years later that things had not been the same between him and Wilson afterward.

It was sometime in this period that Wilson went to see the film Seconds, which had a brief profound impact on him. Wilson had entered the theater late, and immediately upon arriving heard Rock Hudson's character "Mr. Wilson" greeted on screen, mistaking that the film was talking directly to him. He would expound on the experience saying that it had "completely blown" his mind, and that, "The whole thing was there. I mean my whole life. Birth and death and rebirth. The whole thing. Even the beach was in it, a whole thing about the beach. It was my whole life right there on the screen.…I mean, look at Spector, he could be involved in it, couldn't he? He’s going into films. How hard would it be for him to set up something like that?" Wilson had already developed an enduring obsession with the music of Phil Spector upon hearing the song "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes a few years earlier. During the Smile era, he would say, "Spector started the whole thing. He was the first one to use the studio.…I heard that song three and a half years ago and I knew that it was between him and me. I knew exactly where he was at and now I've gone beyond him. You can understand how that movie might get someone upset under those circumstances."

Group conflicts and label pressure

In addition to Brian's mental health problems, and his many personal, family and creative pressures, there were other significant business and legal pressures surrounding the Beach Boys during the recording of Smile. These included Carl Wilson's call-up notice for the draft (which he was to fight as a conscientious objector), plus the commencement of the group's contractual dispute with Capitol over royalty payments. In addition, there was the band's attempt to terminate their then-present contract, which was a legacy of Murry's management, and establish their own label, Brother Records. Bruce Johnston has also indicated in a web forum discussion that there was also opposition to the project from Capitol Records and from Brian's father, Murry.

There’s tracks…that represent not a great lost album but the worst times we ever went through. I listen to them and…I feel uncomfortable, I can hear Brian disintegrating. The music was cool but…we hated him then because we didn’t really know what was happening to him.

— Bruce Johnston, 1993

Infighting within the group was also a potential factor in the demise of Smile. The December 6, 1966 session for "Cabin Essence" was famously the scene of an argument between Van Dyke Parks and Mike Love where the latter questioned Parks about the meaning of the song's lyrics, displaying uncertainty over whether they'd be appreciated and understood by the fanbase the band had built their commercial standing upon. Love was also critical of the drug culture the period brought to the group, observing the detrimental affects it played on his cousin. He has since hypothesized that his vocal opposition to those who supplied Brian with hard drugs caused those participants to spin a web that pinned Love as the reason to why Smile was shelved, something he says was further perpetuated by writers who weren't there.

Despite his reservations, Love contributed vocals when required and followed Wilson's odd requests to engage in behaviour such as acting as an animal on the floor while recording backing vocals. In a January 7, 1967 issue of New Musical Express, Love spoke of how he believed Wilson had gone on to achieve "greater and greater things" that were received with awe by the group. Since then, he has noted that whatever misgivings he had toward Smile laid only within the lyrics and not the music. Carl Wilson corroborated Love's statements in the 1990s, and also added that he himself personally loved the lyrics. Despite this, Parks over the years has consistently maintained his accusations toward Love, which he calls "revisionism". In an e-mailed rebuttal to statements Love made to MOJO in 2005, Parks described his "…open hostility [as] the deciding factor in the delay of Smile. I can forgive but won’t forget this, in light of the time it cost Wilson in his work." After being reminded several years later of Love's recent self-proclaimed love for the material, Parks reportedly stated laughingly, "I'm just incredulous. I can't believe that he's an enthusiast. I wouldn't condemn him if it took him some time to come to that conclusion. I'll just say that they have an expression in Texas that goes along with such a delayed reaction and that is: he's a little slow out of the shoot. All hat and no cowboy." Parks has also denied accusations by Love that lyrics in Smile promoted or were based upon drug use.

On the December 15 vocal sessions for "Surf's Up" and "Wonderful". The group was filmed by CBS during this session which was reported to have went "very badly". Although there were more Smile sessions (on December 23, January 9, and January 23), work on the major tracks effectively stopped after December 15.

Van Dyke Parks' leave and constantly fluctuating directive

I walked away from the situation as soon as I realized that I was causing friction between him and his other group members, and I didn't want to be the person to do that. I thought that was Brian's responsibility to bring definition to his own life. I stepped in, perhaps, I 'took a leap before I looked'. I don't know, but that's the way I feel about it.

— Van Dyke Parks, 1984

Reportedly, Brian's first exposure to the Beatles' February 1967 single "Strawberry Fields Forever" affected him. He heard the song while driving his car and pulled over to listen, commenting to his passenger Michael Vosse that the Beatles had "got there first". The event made him question whether Smile would still be received as a relevant work among record-buyers and the contemporary rock audience. After the episode, Wilson rigorously continued work mostly on "Heroes and Villains". Throughout the first half of 1967, the album's release date was repeatedly postponed as Wilson tinkered with the recordings, experimenting with different takes and mixes, unable or unwilling to supply a completed version of the album.

In early March 1967, after gradually distancing himself from Wilson and the group, Van Dyke Parks left the project in the wake of signing a record deal with Warner Bros. Records so he could work on his debut album Song Cycle. Later elaborating on his decision to leave, Parks noted in 2013, “Brian’s passion for drugs was overwhelming to me, and that’s why I left the project when I did. It was a little too much to be of real practical value and would lead to destruction. Of course, it had a great deal to do with his psychological collapse."

As a result of Parks' quittance, Brian Wilson lost sight of the album's direction. He went back and forth considering many different ways to execute Smile, fluctuating between ideas such as a sound effects collage, a comedy album, and a "health food" album. In the 1980s, Carl Wilson stated "Brian ran into all kinds of problems on Smile. He just couldn’t find the right direction to finish it." Bruce Johnston said "It was almost like he was climbing Mount Everest, and he was getting more boulders hanging on his back and snow coming down on him while he was trying to finish, and finally he just didn't finish it."

Danny Hutton—who was a close friend of Brian Wilson at the time—has speculated that the number of possible variations of song edits became too overwhelming for Wilson: "It's almost like when you hear a commercial ten times, and all of a sudden you start humming it, and you don't even know if you like it or not, because you've heard it so many times you can't even judge…He heard them so many times…He lost that ability of the "freshness" to know which part should go where…He was in these puzzles of putting the songs together.…Because of the outside pressure and being confused on what to do with these series of pocket symphony parts that he had, I think there was a moment where he just threw up his hands and said 'the time has passed,' which it hadn't been but in his head."

Other people have speculated that Wilson could not have finished the album simply because his ambitions were impossible to fulfill with pre-digital technology. The Smile Sessions audio engineer and compiler Mark Linett said, "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."

Aftermath

Smiley Smile

Main article: Smiley Smile

Brian blirted [sic] it out one evening at Bellagio, and later spoke about it several times in agonizing detail. He had expected that 'Heroes' would be greeted by Capitol as the work which put the Beach Boys on a creative par with the Beatles. All the adoration and promotional backup Capitol was giving the Beatles would also flow to his music because of Heroes, he thought.…The public bought the record in respectable but surely not wowy zowy numbers. For Brian, this was the ultimate failure. His surfing/car songs were the ones they loved the most. His musical growth, unlike that of Messrs. Lennon and McCartney, did not translate into commercial ascendancy or public glory.

—Manager Jack Rieley, writing for an online Q&A on October 18, 1996

A few weeks after Smile had been pronounced cancelled, Wilson finalized "Heroes and Villains" as the Beach Boys' next single. In the months leading up to its release, it had garnered a considerable amount of hype, with many publications referring to it as another recording milestone on par with the innovations present in "Good Vibrations". In June 1967, Wilson personally delivered an exclusive acetate of "Heroes and Villains" to radio station KHJ-AM by limousine. As Wilson excitedly offered the acetate for radio play, the DJ refused, citing program directing protocols, which Terry Melcher recalls "just about killed [Brian]".

Upon its release in July, "Heroes and Villains" disappointingly peaked at only number 12 on the Billboard pop charts, and was met with general confusion amongst underwhelming reviews. This included the seminal rock figure Jimi Hendrix negatively describing the single as a "psychedelic barbershop quartet" to NME. Wounded by the relative indifference to "Heroes and Villains," Wilson's emotional state began to plummet further.

The Beach Boys still needed to complete an LP record to fulfill their obligations to Capitol Records, so an album replacement was recorded throughout June and July. Following the stillbirth of Smile, Wilson retreated to his Beverly Hills house, and this became the venue for the recording of much of the Beach Boys' next album, Smiley Smile. Released that September, the album included newly stripped-down recordings of several Smile tracks. Besides its title and contents, the album was somewhat linked to Smile by carrying on the "humor" concept; much of the album is idiosyncratic, features scattered sounds of laughter, and includes at least one comedy skit: "She's Goin' Bald". The album was later described by brother and bandmate Carl Wilson as "a bunt instead of a grand-slam".

Smiley Smile was received with confusion by critics and was the group's lowest-selling album to date in the US, making only number 41 on the Billboard 200, although it fared considerably better in Britain, where it reached number nine on the album chart. Brian Wilson gradually retreated from the public eye and over the ensuing years became disabled by his mental health problems to fluctuating degrees. The Smile period is often reported as the pivotal episode in his decline, causing him to become tagged as one of the most notorious celebrity drug casualties of the rock era.

Bootlegs and reconstructions

After Brian abandoned the Smile project, Carl Wilson would frequently revisit the session tapes, taking into mind the possibility of salvaging them for future releases. In early 1972, the Beach Boys announced that they would be finishing the Smile album to follow up on the success of their Surf's Up album. By the end of the year, the idea was either abandoned or forgotten, with Brian refusing to participate in any further Smile-related material.

When asked about Smile in a 1976 interview, Brian said that he still felt an obligation to put out Smile, and that the album would be released "…probably in a couple years." Later in the 1970s, Bruce Johnston said that an assembled release of Smile would be a "bad idea" commercially, and that it would be too difficult to market for the record-buying public.

By the beginning of the 1990s, Smile had earned its place as the most famous unreleased pop album, and was a focal point for bootleg recording makers and collectors. A 1988 proposed sequencing of the album by engineer Mark Linett eventually leaked to the public. The album had evidently also begun being passed around various musician circles.

In 1993, the five-CD boxed set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of The Beach Boys was released containing archival Smile material. The second disc of the set included almost thirty minutes of original recordings, including versions of several key Smile tracks, an alternate version of "Heroes and Villains" and numerous linking segments featuring the "Heroes and Villains" theme, plus a bare-bones piano and vocal demo of "Surf's Up". These recordings, sequenced by David Leaf, made it clear that Smile had been much closer to completion than had previously been thought, and this prompted much excitement by fans over what additional songs might exist, and debate about how the songs fit into the Smile running order. There was hope that the box set would be followed by an official Smile release, but it failed to materialize.

With the emerging popularity of the Internet in the mid-1990s, the bootlegged Smile recordings became more widely available through a series of websites and "tape trees". A few websites actually offered full downloads of the tracks, and fan edits and arrangements started to appear. Beginning in 1997, the bootleg label Sea of Tunes (named after the Beach Boys' original publishing company) began releasing a series of CDs featuring high quality outtakes, session tracks and alternate recordings that ranged across the group's entire career. Among these was a three-CD set featuring over three hours of sessions for "Good Vibrations", and several multi-CD sets containing a significant number of the tracking, overdubbing and mixing sessions for Smile.

Unofficial reconstructions of the album were often attempted by fans in order to "complete" the album and give the recordings a cohesive listening structure. For decades, fan-created playlists were the only way for the public to listen to an approximation of Smile as it would have been heard performed by the Beach Boys. One of the most popular of which, Purple Chick presents: The Beach Boys Smile, was an online mix tape assembled shortly after Wilson began performing the Smile material in 2004. The mix combined bootlegged 1960s Smile sessions with recordings from Brian Wilson's finished 2004 solo album.

Brian Wilson Presents Smile

Main article: Brian Wilson Presents Smile

Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks revisited Smile with Brian's touring musicians in 2004, 37 years after its conception. First, in a series of concerts (debuting at London's Royal Festival Hall on February 20, 2004), then as the solo album Brian Wilson Presents Smile, released in September 2004. The album debuted at number 13 on the Billboard 200 chart, and later earned three Grammy nominations, winning Brian Wilson his first solo Grammy award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance ("Mrs. O'Leary's Cow"). In 2005, the album won graphic artist Mark London and Nonesuch/Elektra Records the 2005 ALEX award for Best Vinyl Package.

The Smile Sessions

Main article: The Smile Sessions

On October 31, 2011 a compilation of the Smile recordings was released under the title The Smile Sessions. The recording features a disc which presents a listening experience mimicking the template of Brian Wilson Presents Smile. The Smile Sessions is available in various levels of comprehensiveness including a standard two-CD package, as well as a limited edition deluxe box set comprising 5 CDs, 2 LPs, 2 45 rpm singles, and a 60-page booklet. This compilation was released to mass acclaim and won the Best Historical Album award at the 55th Grammy Awards.

Tributes and acknowledgements

The theme of SMiLE assayed an inclusive history…through American folk memory, cowboy songs, comic songs, fairgrounds and cartoons, the revenant traces of doo-wop, barbershop, Sacred Harp and Shaker hymns, Native American and Hawaiian chants, the noises of daily life and those far echoes from sons of the pioneers, their riverrun from Plymouth Rock delivered under the similtude of a dream wherein is discovered the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey and the destruction he wrought in the name of family, sons and holy ghosts.…Water flows, surf's up, feel flows: I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety...

—David Toop, The Wire, November 2011

Independent musicians and groups such as Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, the Olivia Tremor Control, and Secret Chiefs 3 have all recorded cover versions of Smile tracks. Smiling Pets (1998) is a tribute album which largely focuses on various artists' interpretations of Smile-era recordings by the Beach Boys. Both albums Making God Smile: An Artists' Tribute to the Songs of Beach Boy Brian Wilson (2002) and Smiles, Vibes & Harmony: A Tribute To Brian Wilson (1991) features cover artwork reworked from the original Smile album artwork.

Various artists have cited Smile and its themes as a major influence. Kevin Shields of the American shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine is reported to have based some of the 2013 album m b v as being "more impressionistic and akin to Brian Wilson’s SMiLE than Loveless," and that "he recorded m b v in fits and starts, wanting to see what would happen when he put the parts together at the end." According to Kevin Barnes, some of Of Montreal's album Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse was based on Smile. The album Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One by the Olivia Tremor Control has been compared to Smile for its dichotomous vocal harmony pop and avant-garde tape manipulation.

Writing a deeply-felt piece about Smile for The Wire in 2011, English musician and author David Toop cited Frank Sinatra, the Lettermen, the Four Freshmen, Martin Denny, Patti Page, Chuck Berry, Spike Jones, Nelson Riddle, Jackie Gleason, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, the Penguins, and the Mills Brothers as some of the many contradictory templates he's heard "buried within Smile's music legacy."

Elvis Costello described a Smile piano demo of Surf's Up as akin to an original recording of Mozart in performance, and added "It’s such an amazing tune. The words are very much of the time, they sound beautiful when they’re sung—and quite of lot of that is true with the rest of the songs that come from this period, where obviously there was a stress and strain in realizing the music." Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins has written enormous praise to Smile, calling the album "one of the best things you are likely to hear in all of your life. There are moments on SMiLE that are so astonishingly good you might find yourself just staring at your speakers in unguarded wonder, as I have."

Weird Al Yankovic recorded a song on his 2006 album Straight Outta Lynwood modeled after Smile's aesthetic, entitled "Pancreas".

The 1993 fiction novel Glimpses by Lewis Shiner contains a chapter in which the protagonist travels back in time to November 1966 and helps Wilson complete Smile.

Scenes from the films Grace of My Heart and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story both feature homages to Smile, the latter of which contains a parody of Brian Wilson's music style composed by Van Dyke Parks. The albums sessions were dramatized in the made-for-television biopics Summer Dreams: The Story of the Beach Boys and The Beach Boys: An American Family.

Brian Wilson would later revisit Smile's themes and cut-up structure within his eponymous debut solo album Brian Wilson, which features the eight-minute-long psychedelic western saga "Rio Grande".

References

• Siegel, Jules. "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!", Cheetah Magazine #1 (October 1967)
• Priore, Domenic. Look, Listen, Vibrate, Smile: The Book about the Mysterious Beach Boys Album. (Surfin' Colours Hollywood, 1987)
• Priore, Domenic. Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece. (Bobcat Books, 2007) [ISBN 1860746276]

External links

• Rockument-Beach Boy's Smile Sessions with commentary and links to music
• "Heroes and Villains" video archive at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
• Stylus Magazine article
• Smiley Smile - fan site with message board
• An interview with "Smile" historian Domenic Priore
• Background information and essays on the making of