What do you think would have have happened if the Beach Boys finished Smile?

If it had come out before Sgt. Pepper, I still don't think it would have been hailed at the time as the game changer that Sgt. Pepper was. It was hooked by the #1 single "Good Vibrations", but so was Smiley Smile ("Heroes and Villains" was also a moderate hit) and it only made the lower tiers of the top 100. I think it would have charted lower than Pet Sounds (which, at # 10, was hardly the "failure" some people say it was commercially), and may well have been critically lauded, but the average Beach Boys fan would have been baffled by it. The Beatles had a rare talent for finding that delicate balance between being radically experimental and commercially accessible at the same time. That's why Sgt. Pepper made such a big splash (aided by the Beatles' high profile, of course). The Mothers ' Freak Out come out in 1966 and was further out in left field than Pepper( and arguably,Smile), but the commercial accessibility wasn't there, so it only appealed at the time to a devoted cult. The Beach Boys' public profile was higher than the Mothers', but they weren't quite as highly respected as the Beatles at the time, so I think Smile would have been seen as a critically acclaimed commercial misstep at the time, since overall it also didn't have the commercial viability of Pepper. The world will never know, but I will always wonder.

 

Pet Sounds actually made # 10 in Billboard. Most artists would have been delighted with that king of "bomb." It was only seen as a relative failure because it charted lower than their previous albums.

 

There would have been a lesion in the space-time continuum. Cleveland would be erased from the map, so Mike Love would have never made that acceptance speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

 

I don't think it would have been well received. My parents and my sister all love the Beach Boys but they didn't like SMiLE when they saw it performed live in 2004. They were certainly not the only people in the audience who were less than enthusiastic about it. If it was a bit too far out for a lot of Beach Boys listeners even in 2004, I can't imagine it being well received in 1967.

 

Tony Sclafani - is that a pseudonym for Mike Love?

 

Don't knock Mike. You can understand why he had a problem with Van Dyke's lyrics.
After all, Mike is the genius who thought to rhyme "now" with "now" in Fun, Fun, Fun. Several times.

 

A commercial disappointment, and -- eventually, but not immediately -- a critical favourite.

Smile would have suffered in the comparison with Sgt. Pepper's simply because the Beatles were cool and the Beach Boys square.

The Beatles were basically hip, no matter what they did. They were brillliant communicators (and brilliant musicians too, of course).

 

My own personal opinion was that it would have been a commercial failure stateside, but a critical and commercial success in the UK.
However, I think things would have played out the same for The Beach Boys and Brian in the period after, only this time they wouldn't have any SMiLE material to use on albums in the years to come.

 

I think you have a point. And I also agree "Smile" would not have connected with the average record buyer.

It's just that the art of selling records needs to combine a number of elements (image, music, lyrics, timing, etc.) that were just not there for Smile.

Not everybody can be "hip" in other people's minds.

 

Tony, you're so gonna get your ass kicked. I am currently composing an alliteration filled puntastic encyclopedic gothic American agricultural poem polemic that's gonna sail on sailor, right over your head and kick you in the ass. I'm English, I just lit a fag and i'm totally above Amusement Parks USA and i sneer at the 4th of July dancing fools who dance to Fun, Fun , Fun with it's rhymes of now,now,now,now. We music geeks need Art and i'm not talking about Paul Simon's future recording plans. I'm talking High Art, i mean like really high, like 3 cans of Reddi-whip high.
You're under arrest, I'll see you in the cantina, I'm in great shape and you may find yourself lost and found under a cornfield being "liked" by worms..
I'll be arriving at Plymouth Rock shortly to discuss your apparent inability to appreciate how there are two kinds of music fans in this debate - heroes and villains.
er...you wouldn't hit a fella wearing opera glasses would ya ?

 

It was Brian's inability to combine a number of Elements that led to the album being shelved. I mean he even started that fire somehow mystically....

 

This is a good point and I actually think that it would have worked to the band's advantage if Brian had just gotten Smile out of his system in 1967. Then they could have moved on with their "back to basics" approach on Wild Honey without this albatross around their necks. Brian and the band wouldn't have had this crutch to fall back on and Surf's Up would have been Landlocked with more Dennis material.

 

You're probably right but i suspect Brian was on a hiding to nothing by this point. It does appear that his mental instability was taking hold - not apparent on the session tapes but the well-known stories from that time suggest big trouble was brewing. Brian was making great American music like Carl Stalling and Charles Ives which is to be applauded. After all he had made a run of fine pop albums and singles, why not let him do one for the art but expecting the public to really latch on to it was probably like Van Gogh expecting to sell another painting in his lifetime.
If the album had been released dec 66 or jan 67 and failed, that probably would have accelerated Brian's state.
If it had been a success, maybe he would have gone back to a more commercial approach for the BB's or even gone solo but i somehow doubt it would have stopped his problems taking control. Plus as pointed out, several future albums would be a Smile track or two short.
In my ideal world, it probably would have gone over like Pet Sounds, a pretty decent hit in the States (top 10) and huge in Europe and would be revered today as a masterpiece.
But, as Tony pointed out (before i threatened to kick his ass) and i think i did too, the only really obvious commercial track is Good Vibrations. I struggle to think what would have made a good follow up 45 to coincide with the albums release though the music geek elitist in me wishes Surf's Up could have been released as a late 1966 single.

 

Critically heralded as the greatest album ever, publicly would have sold well in England and not so much in the US (see pet sounds)

 

I was 19 when it was released. I originally bought it because I was a fan, and because of the tremendous amount of airplay that WIBN, GOK, and SJB received. It was a no brainer. Loved Caroline, No, and Don't Talk beyond description. The other tracks indeed took repetitive listens before I completely "got it". As the years passed I too thought that this was a Brian solo with the BB's guesting. It was also a fm/am crossover lp which brought in two separate types of listeners. As for Smile, since it was never released as intended, it would be extremely difficult to say how it would have been received back in the day. Many feel that Brian reached his peak with GV- I for one, do not believe that in the least.

 

Part and I do mean A PART of the problem at the time was that while the Beach Boys had had successful albums, at the time they were being more marketed for singles sales. I don't buy that the American public was too stupid or whatever to buy an artistically challenging album. It wasn't that long (mid 67) that the Beatles scored a huge hit with Sgt. Pepper's, and that was an arty album.

By comparison the Beach Boys released a huge hit in Good Vibrations, and that was a very creative, different and on one level challenging song. Songs like Caroline, No and God Only Knows before it were also well received, and of course Sloop John B (some argue this did not really belong on Pet Sounds) was huge as well.

I concede Pet Sounds was not as well received as some earlier albums, and to be fair as great as it is, I am not sure it hangs together as an album as well as Sgt. Pepper's. I don't think it does.

The challenge with Smile then would have been whether as it would have been recorded and produced would it have been perceived as a coherent album, or just a mix of songs with Good Vibrations on it?

 

In 1967 The Beatles had enough credibility and influence to drag their fans into something as radical as Sgt. Pepper. The Beach Boys didn't.

 

I'm not a huge Beach Boys fan although I do like just about all of their 1960s output. I find Pet Sounds to be a really good, but WILDLY overrated, album. I believe Smile would have bombed, especially going up the other records that their contemporaries (Beatles, Stones, Doors, Who, Kinks, Zappa, Airplane, Byrds, etc) were putting out in the same time period. In retrospect, it's probably better it was never released as I'm sure the failure of what Brian thought was to be his magnum opus would have shattered him even worse than the failure to launch did. That being said, I do like the reconstructed album and sessions on bootleg. But as was said above, I think the reverence in which its held has more to do with it being a "lost" (see: Carnival of Light for another example) than the actual substance of it.

 

Well, the section of public we are talking about mostly consisted of people that were looking for that kind of record in the first place. The Beatles were so huge that many of their followers liked every record, no matter how crazy it was, with a few people still scratching their heads (I'm thinking mostly of that clip on American Bandstand where the young audience is reacting to having just watched the "Strawberry Fields Forever" promo). The Beach Boys, because of the commercial following that they had, must have had an even harder time transitioning their music. Brian Wilson knew where he wanted to go, but I'm guessing the group wasn't as sure as he was. It don't think it mattered as much to him how much the album sold, but it must have been easier to assume that that kind of record would have at least a modicum of success in that era of pop music.

And BTW, I choose not compare Pet Sounds to Pepper, it's a very apples and oranges discussion that has no real basis. The Beatles and the Beach Boys were not even doing the same things, so why even put them head-to-head?
To me the comparison between the groups ends with "They were both pop groups on Capitol and their name starts with 'B'".

 

Really interesting to hear it from your "at the time" perspective. I'm one of those missed it at the time (not born yet !), discovered it in the late 80s (thanks to Paul McCartney) music/musician nerds. Knew the surf/car stuff as a kid. Once i heard and "got" Pet Sounds it was a case of what did he do next then. I'm still blown away by Smile 30 years later !
I think Good Vibrations was the commercial peak but it wasn't the artistic peak. Perhaps Til I Die was, and then he fell/jumped off that cliff....he did keep growing after Smile though. The best of his work post Smile to Til I Die is really quite astonishing and under appreciated. Speaking as a musician, the chords of This Whole World are simply not of this world !
In recent years, having moved cities , new friends etc... come party time (been a lot of 45 years old parties so everyone brings 45s), i put on Good Vibrations and people who have no interest in 60s music are gushing about it's greatness and everyone still freaks out over it. It is an ecstatic record even when your not eight miles high. It's definitely a peak of some kind !
I ramble....Old Surfer Dude, what do you consider Brian's artistic peak to be ?

 

The Van Dyke lyrics are at times opaque but no more so than, say, I Am the Walrus. That was the closest Lennon got to writing a Parksian lyric. Yet an album full of I am the Walrus's might have been a hard sell even for the Beatles. So commercial in 67 for the Beach Boys - probably not, but in the wake of Pepper and psychedelia gone wild in the latter half of 67, it would have sold steadily while not being a "hit" album, and critically it would have been a success.

More interesting to me is if Smile had been released as a 2fer with Carl and the Passions. Carl had a track list and even had subheadings of "Heroes and Villains" indicating he was going to incorporate various bits and pieces of Heroes between tracks. Carl's vision of the album would have been very different from the BWPS we know now and I believe more interesting and a better listening experience.

 

I was just thinking of that American Bandstand clip myself. Most of the audience Dick Clark asks don't appear to have a good impression of it. The girls don't like the moustaches. These are people that went Monkees or something, the older audience, maybe the Beatles followers who'd been with them since the beginning or the newly emerging 'turned on' audience were heading for the challenging, weirder stuff.

 

Would people have bought a "psychedelic" album from Elvis? I guess not.
The Beach Boys always stood for summer, fun, cars and girls. And whenever they moved away from that, their audience didn't follow - no matter how good or bad they were.
Simple as that. The Beach Boys never were cultural leaders, something that only few artists manage to become. So most people didn't follow that path. Why should they when there was so much else around, that was even more attractive.
Many artists had to find out over the years that a change in style or following some trend doesn't work for them. But - there are no rules in showbusiness, it's always try and error.
All in all the Beach Boys can't complain about anything. Except for the troubles inside their band.

 

Thank you. I always scratch my head when I've read over the years how the Beach Boys were the American equivalent of the Beatles. I just don't see it. Yes, Brian was a great songwriter and producer, but as much as I like their music, I can't put anything they've done on par with what the Beatles or many other bands at the time were doing on a year-by-year basis. With the exception of maybe "Good Vibrations" and Pet Sounds, and even those I find to be very good, but not great (and quite overrated). I realize that's just my opinion, but I'm with Helmut, the Beach Boys were not really ever leaders.

 

Good post, Ash. One could say GV was his artistic/commercial peak. But Brian wrote number ones before that so I'm saying it's a part of his peak. It was like watching a flower bloom from 1963 all the way to Holland's Fairy Tale Music in 72, at least for me. Supposedly, those snippets were originally to be fully fleshed out by Brian-it never happened but just listen to that amazing material! I don't think he ever really "lost it" as far as the ability to do so, I think he kinda had to deal with other manifestations going on through the years. Look at the surge of songwriting that occurred in 98 that we still get on Brian's solo albums. I think it comes when it comes and when it does it appears to be in bursts.