Smile (album)
Perhaps the most famous unreleased rock and roll album of all time, The Beach Boys' Smile (sometimes referenced using the idiosyncratic capitalization SMiLE) was intended as the follow-up to 1966's influential album, Pet Sounds, but was never completed.
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2 The Project Collapses 3 From Famous To Infamous 4 SMiLE Resurrected 5 Track listing 6 The set order of the 2004 live performances 7 Related literature |
Disappointed by the comparatively poor sales of his previous project, Beach Boys composer and leader Brian Wilson set out to record a song which would be full of "happy vibes". The result was "Good Vibrations", a number one hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and which still stands as a milestone in recording history. Subsequently, Wilson attempted to construct his "teenage symphony to God" - a whole album using the kind of unusual sounds and innovative production techniques which had made "Good Vibrations" so successful. Working with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, Wilson recorded a series of songs including "Surf's Up", "Wonderful", "Cabin Essence" and "Wind Chimes".
The project started to hit problems when Wilson recorded the "Fire" piece for an "Elements" suite and became worried that his music was responsible for the start of several fires in the neighborhood. Amidst increasingly erratic behaviour and much use of mind-expanding drugs, Wilson continued to record sections for use in other titles such as "Heroes & Villains", "Do You Like Worms" and "Vega-Tables" without producing many finished recordings. Throughout the first months of 1967 the release date was postponed as Wilson proved unable to supply a completed version of the album, even though most of its components were finished.
Upon the release of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in mid-1967, The Beach Boys scrapped the Smile album, speedily rerecording some of its music for the less ground-breaking replacement Smiley Smile.
Perhaps if Smile had been released as originally planned and in its original form, it would have stood alongside "Sgt. Pepper" and the Moody Blues' Days Of Future Passed as landmark albums that marked turning points in rock history.
Extracts from the Smile sessions continued to surface on Beach Boys albums for the next few years, most notably on 20/20 and Surf's Up.
By the beginning of the 1990s, Smile had earned its place as the most infamous unreleased album in the rock era, and had by now become a haven for bootleg album makers and collectors.
Many of the original Smile versions were finally released on a 1993 box-set, Good Vibrations (edited by Brian Wilson's engineer of choice, Mark Linett, with minimal input by the man himself). But Smile as a unified whole remained unheard by the public-at-large.
Wilson revisited the Smile theme and some of the album's most significant stylistic devices on "Rio Grande", the closing 8-minute suite which appeared on his 1988 solo debut Brian Wilson.
Beach Boys fan sites on the Internet devoted themselves to discussion and analysis of the album; one such web site attempted to reconstruct Wilson's original vision of the Smile album, including audio files of unreleased songs. The tracks were set in an order that had been carefully researched in what was thought to be closer to Wilson's intent. Eventually, those files were taken down.
On February 20, 2004, 37 years after it was conceived, a complete version of Smile was performed by Wilson along with his backing band, which included The Wondermints in a live performance at the Royal Festival Hall in London. This performance was made whole by the addition of either lost or newly-composed lyrics that filled the gaps left open by the original 1966-67 Beach Boys sessions. This show was followed by subsequent performances in Britain. There are no current plans to bring the new Smile to the U.S.
Meanwhile, plans have been announced by Brian Wilson to release a newly recorded studio version of the Smile album later in 2004.
While Smile may have marked the beginning of the downfall of the Beach Boys, it remains a memorable (if not infamous) chapter in the history of both the band and Brian Wilson.
The Conception Of SMiLE
The Project Collapses
From Famous To Infamous
SMiLE Resurrected
Track listing
The songs that would have been
(based upon a handwritten note that Wilson gave to Capitol Records in 1967)
Other tracks and fragments from the sessions
The set order of the 2004 live performances
Suite 1: Americana
Suite 2: Childhood
(note: this name is unconfirmed.)
Suite 3: Elemental
One of the principal sources of original information on Smile, and the basis for much of its legendary status, was Jules Siegel's article, http://www.cafecancun.com/bookarts/wilson.htm Goodbye Surfing, Hello God! which appeared in the first issue of Cheetah Magazine in October 1967.Related literature