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| Cover art ©FalseMemoryFoam Art Department Of Art Dept. - spot the source clues? |
The Beach Boys were still cutting under thirty minute albums right up to '68, so a half-hour SMiLE isn't the absurdity it might seem.
One of the many reasons for SMiLE's non-appearance is not lack of content; it's the opposite. Brian was coming up with just too much material, finding it hard to stay focused. Every SMiLE reconstruction has had the same problem. Coming up with a CD length reconstruction, let alone a forty minute album, has meant shuffling innumerable snippets and unfinished fragments into a coherent whole.
So here's a slightly different approach. It didn't start out as a Thirty Minutes project - that was literally a last-minute change from a "Suite SMiLE" idea when I noticed the run time.
The ground rules were:
- No cartoon whimsy. Brian at various times mentioned it was going to be a comedy album, whatever that is, and this was one of the many distractions that became an unstoppable avalanche of ideas. So no I'm In Great Shape and Vegetables or George Fell Into His French Horn skits. SMiLE is a serious work of art.
- No fragments of cover versions. No Gee, I Wanna Be Around, You Are My Sunshine, The Old Master Painter ...
- No "elements suite" Another unfinished concept he was trying to shoe-horn in. It's an unnecessary complication, and Fire never resolved itself into an actual piece of listenable music; it was always a big banging howling thrash that never fit anywhere without totally disrupting the flow.
So that's snipped a lot of tape, and we're still left with enough songs in a state of completion, or very nearly so, to constitute an album:
Good Vibrations
Wind Chimes
Cabinessence
Wonderful
Roll Plymouth Rock
Heroes And Villains
Cool Cool Water
Surf's Up
Child Is Father To The Man
Our Prayer
This is the order (and the titles) I smoothed into a suite, and it makes no claim to be definitive or preferable to other attempts at reconstruction or re-imagination.
Brian was so damn close to completing SMiLE. Much closer than he's generally given credit for. The biggest missing from the list was the verse to Roll Plymouth Rock, which Dae Lims brilliantly exhumed from a brief studio fragment (on YouTube, but I can't find it now). Why that didn't make the SMiLE box, or the Brian Wilson Presents "recreation" is baffling - the extraordinary melody of the song is right there. If Brian had spent another day on the song in the studio, and maybe a focused week in total, free of distractions, we'd have the album! But ... his life was complex. That he survived at all is something of a miracle.
I haven't been purist in my choice of sources. This isn't a historical document, and I've used whatever sounded good to me, which means the original recordings wherever possible, and the Surf's Up version of Surf's Up. Why not? It's The Beach Boys, fercrissakes, and the gap between SMiLE and the Surf's Up album dwindles to effectively nothing from the perspective of 2025.
My edits have been culled from the Beach Boys official catalog (any period), Dae Lims, and SonicLovesNoise. You don't need this - but it's nice.
LINK IN COMMENTS
The SMiLE you send out returns to you.
I'm going to drive this thing around the block a few more times before I put it on the forecourt. There'll be enough small surprises to please even the most obsessive SMiLER.
ReplyDeleteIn the mean time, let's talk comedy albums. Woody Allen's still work for me.
Firesign Theatre's Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers . . . --Muzak McMusics
ReplyDeleteFM & AM by Carlin was the only comedy album I ever owned.
ReplyDeleteViv Stanshall, Sir Henry At Rawlinson End is still making me laugh after forty years. The Python albums have aged much better than the TV show. But Ivor Cutler (Buster Bloodvessel, the driver from The Magical Mystery Tour) is in a league of his own.
ReplyDeleteCheech and Chong were favourites of mine in the 80s, also Derek and Clive, but I haven’t visited them for a long time, maybe today is the day?
Anyone remember It Clicks by Murray Roman from Busted? Not available of YewChewb.
A favorite past time back when was getting high and listening to Richard Pryor. God they were funny. Have no idea if they are still funny.
ReplyDelete"Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America" . . . as well as the 1960's-1970's Firesign Theatre.
ReplyDeleteMr. Smith and I have identical taste in comedy albums! I do appreciate several of the other suggestions people have made, but Stan created an America that I wanted to live in ("this way, Mr. First-Nighter!"). Firesign was commenting on the America I did live in.
DeleteI do like tunes with snappy patter, so I'll mention Tom Lerher and "That Was The Year That Was." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fSbbsWrxqc
D in California
There was an album around 1970 called A Child's Garden of Grass. As I recall it had some of the Firesign guys and was kinda like a cross between Firesign Theatre & Cheech & Chong, but not as good...
ReplyDeleteBill Hicks' 'Rant In E Minor' does it for me, although i could also probably answer this question with reference to the same album i cited in a previous thread on psychedelic albums, i.e. Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias' 'Italians From Outer Space'. I still know all the words to 'Holiday Frog' and will shamelessly sing it at the drop of a pork pie hat.
ReplyDeleteI must dig out Italians From Outer Space, haven't heard it in years. I think I may have Snuff Rock 7" somewhere too.
DeleteWhen I was a kid (before there were Beatles albums) my folks had a couple of Allan Sherman's elpees, which we all loved, both because we knew a lot of the original (classical-ish) tunes and because the parody words were generally really witty, albeit with an abundance of absurd puns.
ReplyDeleteHello Mother, Hello Father...
DeleteAs an “obsessive SMiLEr”, I ought to contribute to the comedy album discussion.
ReplyDeleteIt’s hard to beat any of the “Goon Show Classic” albums, but they were compiled from radio shows so maybe don’t count. As a Scot, the ur-comedy album has to be Billy Connolly’s 1974 “Solo Concert” (so-called because, at the time, he was better known as half of the Humblebums with Gerry Rafferty). For young Scots, the impact of its hysterically funny affirmation of our working-class sense of humour brought up to date, was incalculable. Connolly’s irreverent 15 minute retelling of the last supper and crucifixion, transposed to the East End of Glasgow, was a phenomenal comedic achievement. If you want to understand Glaswegians (and who doesn’t) the album doubles as a comprehensive, if violent, cultural introduction. I find that if I tire of either the Goons or Connolly, any Queen album is just as funny and will do instead.
Used to hear Ray Stevens' "Ahab the Arab" on the radio, but not lately, for some strange reason...
ReplyDeleteOooooookaaaayyyyyy ... here is the link, this is the link, the link is here:
ReplyDeletehttps://workupload.com/file/NCwyfh2NnbS
Like I said, nobody needs a new SMiLE mix, but there are some curious souls that want one. The questions this poses are, does it lack anything? Is it in any way incomplete? Does it sound less than an album? Does it need comedy interludes, snatches of nostalgic old songs, a "suite of the elements"? The answer to all of them is, as I think you'll agree on giving this a spin, is a resounding nope.
It's unashamedly hybrid, culled from different sources, but the way it sonically and thematically hangs together is due to Brian's vision; a vision which got clouded. This is the version we might have had if the world had left him alone.
And one more time: there's a shitload of my editing and "remixing" going on - in the limited sense I can without access to separated tracks and isolated vocals and so on. Shuffling, cutting, overdubbing, crossfading, often at granular level, changes tiny and big. But all the credit for everything should go to Brian, every version of SMiLE is in homage to him.
Very nicely done. Congrats!
ReplyDeleteThank 'ee, notBob! Nothing really new, just a little different.
DeleteI swapped my SMiLE attempt that used most of the same tracks as yours (but not remixed & spiffied up) & added the early surf hits & Pet Sounds essentials for my go-to BB anthology.
Delete