The Beach Boys – SMiLE
(soniclovenoize 1967 mix)
Sept 2013 UPGRADE
Side A:
1. Our Prayer
2. Heroes and
Villains
3. Vege-Tables
4. Do You Like Worms?
5. Child Is Father Of
The Man
6. The Old Master
Painter
7. Cabin Essence
Side B:
8. Good Vibrations
9. Wonderful
10. I’m In Great
Shape
11. Wind Chimes
12. The Elements
13. Surf’s Up
This is an UPGRADE to my reconstruction of The Beach Boys
SMiLE album. The goal of this
reconstruction is to recreate what the SMiLE album would have sounded like in
1967 if it had actually been finished.
To do this we must discard any notion of the “correct” tracks sequence from
the 2004 album Brian Wilson present SMiLE, as well the first disc of the 2011
SMiLE Sessions box set. All original Beach
Boys recording are used; no anachronistic “fly-ins” from Brian Wilson Presents
SMiLE were used. Also no digital
pitch-shifting or digital extraction was used.
This is an attempt to be as authentic to the material as possible and offer
a strictly 1967 version of SMiLE. My mix
is all mono (as it would have been released in 1967) but an alternate
custom-made stereo mix is also included for those curious audiophiles. The best possible source-tapes were used,
almost exclusively material found on the 2011 The SMiLE Sessions box set.
The upgrades in this Sept 2013 edition are:
- The true stereo
1967 “Our Prayer” from the Made in California boxset (as opposed to my synch of
the mono 1967 version with the stereo 1969 version)
- My own upgraded stereo mix of “Child Is Father of The
Man”, increasing the volume of the vocal track.
- A completely new stereo remix of “Cabin Essence” sources
from recreated mutlitracks.
- My own upgraded
stereo mix of “Old Master Painter” with a more accurate synch of the backing
and vocal tracks
- The mono mix of “Good Vibrations” from the 2012 Smiley
Smile remaster replaces the previous version, the mono master from the 40th
Anniversary EP, because of better dynamic range/less brickwalled compression.
- My own upgraded stereo
mix of “Good Vibrations”, increasing the volume of the vocal track.
- My own upgraded
true stereo mix of “Wonderful” instead of my previous ‘duophonic’ mix. Note that this even improves upon my new
stereo mix from last week’s update of my 2004 SMiLE. Here, I used the backing vocals from 2011’s
The SMiLE Sessions, synched to the mono mix found on the 1993 Good Vibrations
box set. The slight variance of EQ and
pitch between the 1993 and 2011 remasters are enough to make the synched
backing vocals really stand out and give it a larger perceived stereophonic
spread.
- A completely new mono edit of “Wind Chimes” with a
different recording as the tag, closer to Brian Wilson’s vintage acetates. A new stereo mix was also made of my new
“Wind Chimes” edit.
Much has been written about the unreleased album SMiLE; even
more so in recent history due to The SMiLE Sessions boxset. The first disc of the set was purported to be
an accurate reconstruction of what SMiLE would have been. But is it so?
In fact it is not: the tracklist is based upon the sequence found on Brian
Wilson’s 2004 solo album Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, in which the great artist
finally “finished SMiLE”. Well surely,
that was how SMiLE was supposed to sound?
It is not: that sequence was devised by The Brian Wilson Band musical
director Darian Sahanaja for the purpose of the previous year’s SMiLE Tour, as
an interesting live performance that showcased all of the known and popular
SMiLE tracks. Furthermore, his vision of
SMiLE seemed to be greatly influenced by sequences found on known bootlegs in the
1990s as well as fan fiction on their own SMiLE mixes. As a matter of fact, Brian Wilson himself has
admitted that what we think of as the “finished SMiLE” is not what it would
have sounded like in 1967; Wilson himself didn’t even know what it would have
sounded like, even in 1967! By spring
1967, the album itself was abandoned and he focused on two songs for a single
release (“Heroes and Villains” and “Vege-Tables”) and the structure of those
two songs changed from day to day! By
the time Wilson had finally resolved upon a final “Heroes and Villains”, the
song was convoluted and lacking the magic of the original versions, as well as
the magic the rest of the albums’ sessions implied.
How could we possibly assemble something that Brian Wilson
himself couldn’t? Fans and SMiLE aficionados
have been spending the last 40 years making their own SMiLE mixes, so it’s not
an unreachable dream. After a decade of
research, I believe I have found a method to make an extremely educated guess
to what the album contained and how it was structured. First and foremost, I offer that SMiLE would
have been a singular two-sided album of 12 pop-songs, just as Pet Sounds was;
not three conceptual suites or movements.
Although, I do believe it was Wilson’s intention to make the 12
individual pop songs mostly connected or related—modulations of a theme over an
album, just as each of the 12 songs were written in a modular fashion. Evidence of this can be seen in how the
discarded pieces of “Heroes and Villains” became their own songs as well as re-occurring musical motifs and arrangements. So while each of the two sides of the album
may be segued as a continuous piece, they are not necessarily organized by a
“concept”.
But of all the many pieces recorded for SMiLE what would be
included? Our first clue is found in a
handwritten tracklist addressed to Capitol Records, which was used to
manufacture LP mock-up artwork for the album.
The tracks included, in this order: “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”, “Vege-Tables” and “The Old Master Painter”. Any astute listener who can make a playlist
will know this is a terrible track sequence for an album; there is no flow or
cohesion and the two sides do not time-out correctly. A listen to this sequence is honestly rather
jarring and confusing. My theory is that
this was not the specific track order but instead this is a shortlist of the
songs that would make the final album.
For a more authentic 1967 SMiLE, we must base our tracklist on these 12
songs. Thus certain SMiLE staples not
included on the list such as “Look”, “He Gives Speeches” or “Holidays” would be
excluded from the final running order.
The one exception is “Our Prayer” used as an (uncredited) opening track
outside of the twelve, which was Brian Wilson’s intention at the time.
Our next step is to take these twelve (thirteen counting
“Our Prayer”) and organize them into two sides of an LP. My theory to create an authentic 1967
reconstruction is to make what I call a ‘SMiLE Sandwich’. First we must get two slices of bread for our
sandwich: the opening and closing tracks of each side of the LP. If SMiLE was simply going to be a modest
follow-up to the previous album Pet Sounds, then we can postulate that it could have
followed industry standards in the 1960s with each side of the album beginning
with one of the songs promoted as a single.
While this rule of thumb is of course not universal, it at least is the
case with both Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile and I believe would have a high probability
of being true. For my reconstruction, I
chose “Heroes and Villains” to open side A (directly after “Our Prayer” of
course) and “Good Vibrations” to open side B.
I do not feel “Good Vibrations” would have closed the album, as that was
a specific choice by Darian Sahanaja as a casual-fan-favorite set-closer, based
on 30 years of hindsight that “Good Vibrations” has become the quintessential
song of the 1960s, let alone of The Beach Boys’ career. It seems more likely in 1967 it would have
been simply tagged on to the beginning of side B as Capitol Record’s cash-cow. More-than-coincidentally, that is exactly how
the song appeared on the final Smiley Smile album anyways.
To close each side of the LP, I took the ethos of George
Martin, the producer of Brian’s chief competition and self-proclaimed ‘brother
across the ocean’: close each side with the song that simply can’t be
followed. Out of the ten remaining songs
left on our shortlist, “Surf’s Up” and “Cabin Essence” are the two most epic
songs, and both actually closed the Surf’s Up and 20/20 albums years
later. Since “Surf’s Up” is probably the
greatest achievement of this album and praised as one of Brian Wilson’s
greatest songs, I chose to conclude side B of the album with it, relegating
“Cabin Essence” to close side A. Now we
have the ‘bread’ of our ‘SMiLE Sandwich’: “Heroes and Villains” and “Cabin
Essence”; “”Good Vibrations” and “Surf’s Up”.
Next we arrange the ‘meat’ of our ‘SMiLE Sandwich’… We have ten remaining songs, many of them
linked musically and conceptually. I
offer that we abandon the notion that the songs are linked thematically and
conceptually. I believe the belief that
the songs fit into two conceptual movements (‘Americana’, ‘Elemental’) is a
modern invention, first an observation by SMiLE researcher Domenic Priore and
perpetuated out of convenience, never truly confirmed by Brian Wilson in a
primary source. Instead we must focus
solely on the musical connections. We
can match up a number of the songs that correlate musically: the ending of
“Child Is Father of The Man” is literally the beginning of “The Old Master Painter”
thus the two should be paired; the arpeggio piano ending of “Do You like Worms?”
fits into the similar arrangements in “Wonderful” and even closer to “Child is
Father of The Man”, thus making two different possible song-sequences; the end
of “Wind Chimes” segues easily into many of “The Elements” pieces (notably both
“I Love To Say Dada” and “Fire (intro)”), which opens some possibilities. Knowing how these aforementioned songs should
be grouped together we can easily fit eight of these ten remaining songs into the
LP sides: “Do You like Worms?” into “Wonderful” into “Child Is Father of The
Man” into “Old Master Painter” completing side A; the remaining “Wind Chimes”
into “The Elements” on side B. This
leaves just the stand-alone tracks “Vege-Tables” and “I’m In Great Shape” to
fill in the gap on side B. While this
was my original intention for an “authentic” 1967 tracklist, I found the album
sides a bit lopsided with a 20-minuite side A and a 17 minute side B. A solution can be found in the final
tracklist of Smiley Smile: if you swap “Wonderful” to side B and “Vege-Tables”
to side A, the result is two 18-minte sides.
Perfection!
A thorough track-by-track examination of my 1967 SMiLE reconstruction
opens with “Our Prayer” which is followed closely by what is known as the
‘Cantina’ version of “Heroes and Villains”, what I believe would have been the
version of the song released on the SMiLE album in 1967. It is most certainly not what I call 'The Kitchen Sink'
version that appeared on BWPS and TSS and we need to accept that many, many
song fragments will be left on the cutting room floor. It is of relevance however that many extra
sections—including “Gee” and it’s variations, the experimental ‘Swedish Frog’
segment’ and the ‘Prelude to Fade’ segment—constitute what I believe is the
theoretical “Heroes and Villains part 2” track, what many believe would have
been the b-side to the single. These
specific segments were all recorded after the ‘Cantina’ version was prepared, yet
before the album was abandoned and “Heroes and Villains” got a complete
facelift. They theory is that Brian
Wilson recorded these parts specifically for the b-side rather than for “Heroes
and Villains” proper. Regardless,
“Heroes and Villains part 2” is not included in this album reconstruction, as
it would not have been on the album in 1967.
My stereo mix of “Heroes and Villains” is 75% in stereo, as the verse sections
in this ‘Cantina version’—which contained the superior vocal performances—are not
available in stereo, existing only in a mono master.
In a move similar to what was officially released on Smiley
Smile, “Heroes and Villains” is followed by “Vege-Tables”. Its construction follows the blueprint found
on TSS, as the song never really had a finalized structure in the first
place. One alteration I made was the
removal of the third verse as I thought it was lyrically redundant and it disrupted
the gradual ‘winding-down’ flow of the song.
My own unique construction of “Do You Like Worms?” follows. Although based on Mark Linett’s construction
from 1993, it presumably follows how Brian intended the structure to be. Note that in my stereo mix—created from
synching the isolated vocals to the assembled backing tracks—the tack piano of
the ‘Bicycle Rider’ theme pre-chorus travels from right to left
stereophonically, reminiscent of the Pilgrims and Pioneers during the Western
Expansion of the US—who The Bicycle Rider presents!
A slight fade and hard edit into the similar arpeggio of
“Child Is Father of The Man”, Mark Linett’s mix is used since he emulated
vintage Brian Wilson edits found on 1967 acetates. My stereo mix here is created by synching the
mono mix with vocals to the assembled stereo backing tracks to create a convincing
stereophonic spectrum.
The ending is crossfaded into “The Old Master Painter” (is
it a coincidence that one song ends with the cello playing the exact same
phrase? I think not!). My stereo mix uses the mono mix with vocals
to literally replace the isolated right channel, which would ordinarily include
the cellos anyways. Also the track concludes
with the alternate, re-recorded “Heroes and Villains Fade”. We
know that at one time the original “Heroes and Villains Fade” that was used in
the ‘Cantina’ mix featured here was also at one time used to end “You Are My
Sunshine” but with an alternate vocal. Since
the fragment is already in use on my mix concluding “Heroes and Villains”, it
cannot be used to conclude “The Old Master Painter”. The solution is to use this alternate re-recording,
which features a more appropriate bird whistle anyways.
The side concludes with “Cabin Essence” of course. My stereo mix was created by remixing from a facsimile
mastertape: a synch of the stereo backing tracks found on TSS, the backing
vocals found on TSS and the isolated lead vocals extracted from a Center
Channel Elimination technique (out-of-phase) applied to the Good Vibrations box
set master of the track. The result is a
fuller stereophonic mix with the instruments panned left and right and the lead
vocals center, rather than vice versa as per the common 20/20 version.
Side B opens with the label’s aforementioned ‘cash cow’
“Good Vibrations” which some believe was never meant to be on SMiLE in the
first place, but was forced on by the label.
Regardless of the truth to that rumor, it fits sonically and
compositionally and its placement here is much like that on the final Smiley
Smile album. My stereo mix synchs the
mono mix with the stereo backing tracks, effectively removing the ‘tape wow’ in
the first verse as well as prolonging the fade-out that ends, in my opinion,
much too quickly.
“Wonderful” follows, one of the few songs actually finished
in 1966 by Brian. The single version is
used here, as that is the version that would have been on SMiLE. My stereo mix is a synch of the mono mix
found on the Good Vibrations box set panned at one o’clock, to the isolated
backing vocals found on TSS panned at seven o’clock. This creates the illusion of a wider
stereophonic spectrum, something that was never previously possible without
messy digital extraction or ridiculous duophonic mixing.
Next is “I’m In Great Shape”, one of the great mysteries for
SMiLE historians. What exactly was this track
supposed to include? Surely the
minute-long fragment was meant for more, or at least intentionally contained
more? There are some who believe that
Brian Wilson intended a four-part barnyard suite for SMiLE, stemming from a
1970s interview with Brian. While this
was never verified past that singular reference (and others assume Wilson was
mistaken and in actuality confused it with his four-part Elements suite), my
reconstruction makes the extrapolation that “I’m In Great Shape” was this four-part
barnyard suite. In order to complete it,
we need to find its three brother pieces.
An easy task, as the fragment “Barnyard” is an obvious choice and fits
as an introduction to the suite (it is in the same key as the “I’m in Great
Shape” fragment and both originate as castoff fragments/ideas for “Heroes and
Villains”). We also know that the songs “I
Wanna Be Around” and “Workshop Song” were labeled as “Great Shape” on the
recording tape box. Assuming they were
labeled correctly we can tag these two fragments to the end of the “I’m In
Great Shape” fragment—the same conclusion Sahanaja came to in 2003!—and conclude
our four-part ‘barnyard suite’ as the longer piece “I’m in Great Shape”. Contrary
to Carol Kaye’s quip, I do not believe “Workshop” is “rebuilding after the fire”,
but in fact building a barn.
Following is “Wind Chimes”, the second song that was
actually completed by Brian Wilson in 1966/1967. Here we use a model of the Linnett mix on the
Good Vibrations boxset--modeled after vintage Brian Wilson acetates--but utilizing the better sources found on TSS
boxset. The separate ‘triple piano’ tag
replaces the tag from the full-band recording on TSS, giving the track an even
more extreme dynamic range.
The final great SMiLE mystery is the track “The Elements”. What exactly constituted each of the
four-part suite? We know that “Mrs. O’Leary’s
Cow” was the ‘Fire’ sections, but that’s about it. My reconstruction postulates, as many others
have before me, that the separate song “Wind Chimes” represented the ‘Wind’
section and “I Love To Say Dada”—the song that eventually evolved into “Cool
Cool Water” represented the ‘Water’ section.
Many postulate “Vege-Tables” as the ‘Earth’ section, but I propose that “I’m
In Great Shape” is a more appropriate contender for the ‘Earth’ section; surely
barnyards and the ‘the great agriculture’ is more earthy than sleeping a lot
and brushing your teeth? Thus the actual
track “The Elements” are the combinations of ‘Fire’ and ‘Water’, the two
elements that did not receive their own separate track proper. Here I used the “Heroes and Villains Intro”
as many others have as an introduction to ‘Fire’ (the sound of firetrucks!);
while this was not a vintage Brian Wilson decision, the piece is fair game
since it was not used in the actual “Heroes and Villains” track. Following my own edit of “Mrs O’Leary’s Cow”
with three repeats of the main musical passage before the breakdown and ending,
we then have the assembled two sections of “I Love To Say Dada.” Instead of using the common mix with Mike
Love’s (quite literally) infantile lyrics, I have chosen to create an entirely
new ‘Water’ section by synching up the “Underwater Chant” from TSS, as well as
inserting the flute and percussion flourishes from a completely different
recording of the song. The result is a
more conceptual elemental track that fits much better with its sister “Mrs O’Leary’s
Cow”. Also note that the droning “Water
Chant” piece found preceding “I Love To Say Dada” on BWPS and TSS was excluded as
it was recorded a year after SMiLE was abandoned, and was thus not part of the
intended album.
My SMiLE reconstruction concludes with the only song that
could possibly conclude it, “Surf’s Up”, SMiLE’s “A Day In The Life”. Here I simply used Mark Linnett’s mix from
TSS that reinstates Brian’s vocal to the instrumental and the album concludes
with the reprised musical themes from side A, specifically “Child Is Father of
The Man”. The stereo mix is sourced from
the double vinyl TSS.
This resulting SMiLE is concise, yet articulate in
direction. Sure, it lacks many of the
sections and secondary songs we’ve grown to love over the years, but really,
would there have been a place for EVERYTHiNG on SMiLE? Probably not.
My conclusion is that many modern SMiLE reconstructions—notably BWPS and
TSS—suffer from the aforementioned 'Kitchen Sink' phenomenon; we forget that just because it
could fit, doesn’t mean it should. SMiLE
would have been as modest as Pet Sounds, albeit her more eccentric sister. Everything is a progression and evolution is
a slow, gradual process. SMiLE in 1967 may
not have been the epic symphony for God as it was in 2004 or 2011, but had it
been released in 1967 as it is reconstructed here, who knows what could have followed
in 1968 or 1969?
Sources used:
Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of The Beach Boys (1993 CD box
set)
Good Vibrations (2006 40th Anniversary CD EP)
Made in California (2013 CD box set)
Smiley Smile (2012 CD remaster)
The SMiLE Sessions (2011 CD box set)
The SMiLE Sessions (2011 LP, son-of-albion vinyl rip)
flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR, Audacity &
Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included
