Are You Still Listening to Smile Sessions 5-CD boxset version?

If it didn’t cost so much to ship, I would sell it. My copy, I mean. I just sold an extra vinyl copy for $60-.

 

That's not to say I didn't enjoy it. It was the same with the Pet Sounds Sessions box. Interesting to listen to once or twice, but I bought it more for the mono and stereo mixes.

 

SMiLE is the best thing Brian ever did.

 

But, he didn't do it. He just kept doing and doing it...and then he couldn't get to the editing stage, where he could make final decisions. I understand he was losing his grip, but, everything he put out there as potential ideas for that album, could have been seen as ideas used in other albums if he was willing and able to look at it that way. I mean, we've seen from the box, relatively little was lost, right? It was just getting to the stage of assembling something worthy of his current abilities, not the be-all and end-all of that period of work.

Maybe I'm not the experts most of you are about this period, but I do know something about knowing when to stop, edit, and look back at all the extra work, as prefacing for the next project.

Maybe the context of "competing with the frikkin' Beatles, for cryin' out loud", poured a little too much creative pressure onto that fire...?

 

Good post, but I think the Beatles thing is largely a myth designed to sell albums by hitching the Beach Boys' wagon onto the Beatles perpetual motion hype machine.

I strongly believe that the competition that Brian felt was with HIMSELF and trying to follow up "Good Vibrations" with an equally commercial "Heroes and Villains", that was also daring and artistically progressive. "Heroes and Villains" was artistically progressive, it was really out there in some of those early forms; but it was never going to match the commercial candy and sunshine appeal of "Good Vibrations" IMO.

He completed most of the other songs' tracks in, like, a day or two each, (with time between, to work up the arrangement, of course); add another day for vocal overdubs.

By contrast he worked on H&V for more than a month, he totally got stuck on that.

At the end of the that time I think he didn't know which was up and he basically was going nuts and started to second guess himself, recording mostly inferior versions of songs he'd already completed to perfection. ("Vega-Tables" being an exception-- that spring 67 version is better than the October version) He ended up pulling his punch on H&V and when that didn't become the golden billion selling #1 that he craved, he just put the rest away. I believe he totally orchestrated a lot of the hype and he totally created this myth of the reclusive genius because it was better than releasing SMiLE and having it fail commercially. He was too tied to commercial success.

 

I've found this to be the case with any number of box sets and even some single discs that I own: as archival tools from which I draw music for more streamlined projects and concepts.

 

haven't listened in a while, but this thread has inspired me to put it on on this rainy sunday morning.

 

Definitely. I listen to the "finished" album more often, but I love the recording sessions too. The disc that gets played the least here is the one devoted exclusively to "Good Vibrations".

 

I listen to the box set frequently but not disc 1, it’s the sessions that are most fascinating to me. The Heroes disc in particular, since Heroes was to be the masterpiece follow up to GV that so consumed Brian that it became the song that destroyed Smile. If Brian had left the Cantina version as the A side of the single and not pursued a 2 part single, And instead redirected all the time spent on Heroes Part 2 on finishing the album, Smile might have been released.

 

I'm sure I'm in a distinct minority on this one, but when I think of "The Beach Boys", this is the period I think of first: vocally complex and conceptual American Gothic trips, eccentric pocket symphonies...

The box remains one of my prized possessions. Mostly I listen to the disc one "album" with some minor tweaks, but I cherish all of it.

 

Somebody should do a thread sometime about artists who let their work drive them crazy. I can understand the pressures, particularly in one that age with little experience in failure and recuperation, having finally gotten out from under an authority figure, working in an industry where you're only as good as, "what have you done for me lately". He wasn't mentally prepared to be the sensation he became, or even the sensation he felt he needed to be. He hadn't the toolkit for that.

Some artists only struggle with the pressures of whether they're capable of communicating their message in their art the best they can, and suffer for that. Some obsess over whether or not it's the publics' fault if they don't "get it". Some, for better or worse, even bear the weight of not being able to change the public's mind through their efforts.

 

This part of your post isn't clear to me, Lance. Do you mean The Beach Boys tried to take advantage of this "competition" thing? Or that this "hype machine" purposely overshadows The Beach Boys' legacy?

Or none of the above?

 

Something closer to the former.

I don't think it's just the Beach Boys, I think EVERY.SINGLE.(white). Sixties band tries to hitch their narrative to the Beatles' narrative and I think, in regards to Pet Sounds and SMiLE this is very consciously done and probably overemphasized. It does get people interested, because the Beatles are so widely popular, but I do think that it ends up making other bands feel like more of a footnote than they are.

When is the last time you read anything Pet Sounds or SMiLE related article came out without this deliberate line drawn between the Beatles work and the Beach Boys? I'm not saying that it's all made up; I mean, you can clearly hear the influence of "God Only Knows" on "Penny Lane"and "Ticket To Ride" on "Sloop John B" and so on; but I do tend to think that those guys were all pretty busy in those times and were probably more in their own bubble of success and had less overview of what was going on than we the fans, who have a sort of birds-eye view of it all, do.

I absolutely don't believe that Brian abandoned SMiLE because of the Beatles or even that they were the primary, secondary or tertiary problems that he was dealing with.

 

Got it, and agree.

I think Brian quit SMiLE because he must have had enough of the internal tensions.
Not even his bandmates (I'm looking at you, Mike Love) supported him and it was a very complex project that surely demanded a lot of his energy.

 

Still? I never have made it through the entire thing.

 

I think by the time you reach "Teeter-Totter Love", you get an idea of how out of control the whole project was getting. Great ideas, but a cautionary tale; for all the creativity and weird substances and media hype, at the end of the day there's STILL an album to do, and I'm not sure that Brian was up to separating the wheat from the chaff. It's bad if the producer does not have the end zone in mind at all times.

I used to be the world's biggest Smile defender, but when you break it all down, Pepper is infinitely more accessible. There's no "With A Little Help From My Friends" on Smile. It's a shame we'll never know a world in which the albums both existed and were compared and contrasted at the time of completion.


Dan

 

I only have the 2 CD set and I think I've listened to it once. I listened to lots of the boots back in the day and I remember liking those better than the official version.

 

I had kind of the same reaction... late 80s and early 90s I had all the pirates/boots I could lay my mitts on... years later bought Brian's version, mistaking it in the store for the Beach Boys but still spun it... by the time the official version came out, I wasn't sure whether it didn't measure up to the boots or whether I'd just outgrown it... either way, the lustre was off... now it's a little too close to Rodgers & Hammerstein for my liking...

 

Yeah, I know the feeling. I think Brian's version affected my reaction to the later release somehow. The Brian only version is good enough, I suppose, but maybe after that, I'd just had enough of Smile.

 

Unfortunately, I don't think Smile would've had the mass appeal of Sgt Pepper. The lyrics were too convoluted for the average listener.

 

Pet Sounds really didn't do that well, so there's no way Smile would have caught on. It probably would have, at least eventually, gotten critical raves though.

 

SMiLE is so enigmatic. I haven't listened to the sessions for a while (I have the two LP version) but that's just because I overdid it. I'm sure I'll come around again.

While The Beatles may have spurred him on, there is nothing Beatle-esque about SMiLE and Pet Sounds for that matter. This is west-coast American music. The only Beatle comparison is that of excellence.

I also think SMiLE is to some degree a product of Brian's state of mind. He was so far ahead of everyone, envisioning a progressive musical form based not on live performance but recorded segments. He was diving deeper and deeper into following his whims for the concept, and only Good Vibrations emerged complete. And that ONE track took him months to assemble. It would have taken Brian years to make SMiLE properly - it was never going to happen. It must have felt like every day was a step further into a dark, dense forest with no clear way out.

It's a fascinating collection of recordings, to feel and experience the genius at work. But they are shadows - it wasn't finished, and never will be finished in the way Brian saw it back then. In my opinion, anyway.

 

Pet Sounds suffered from a lack of promotion compared with the Greatest Hits Vol 3. It was far more popular in the UK.

 

[QUOTE="Lance LaSalle, post: 25098489, member: 41188"

He ended up pulling his punch on H&V and when that didn't become the golden billion selling #1 that he craved, he just put the rest away. I believe he totally orchestrated a lot of the hype and he totally created this myth of the reclusive genius because it was better than releasing SMiLE and having it fail commercially. He was too tied to commercial success.[/QUOTE]

Well the hype was created by Derek Taylor (and then later David Anderle and Mike Vosse) starting in 1966, when Smile was just beginning as Dumb Angel and no one had any idea the thing would never be released. Brian was complicit in the hype but I wouldn’t go so far as to say he orchestrated it. Eccentric, idiosyncratic, perfectionist, unpredictable genius - yes. But the reclusive part wasn’t until late 68 after the failure of Friends and didn’t really become part of his myth until 70-71 in terms of the press.

Brian was concerned with commercial success as you say and his doubts about the commerciality of the Smile music definitely contributed to his abandoning the project.

 

Is it possible that, in the eyes of the public at the time, the band that gave us "God Only Knows", was still the band that gave us "Fun, Fun, Fun" and woodies and surfboards and bikinis, and introducing the same artistic and creative jumps they were reeling from with The Beatles, was tantamount to America's Daddy, "taking our T-Bird away" in a metaphorical sense?

1967 may have been this watershed "Summer Of Love" shift, but recall, not all of America "shifted" at the same time. Growing up in a small town in Indiana, I'm well aware of the resistance to crazes and fads and styles happening all around us, but not seeing any evidence of it in my own school, neighborhood, or family. In some places the only changes would have been seeing a kicker story at the end of a newscast about hairstyles, or Look magazine being replaced around the house by Rolling Stone.