The Only SMiLE You Need

Cover art ©FalseMemoryFoam Art Department Of Art Dept. - spot the source clues?

RE-UPPED. Read th' screed!

I could be wrong [horrors - Ed.] but I think this version gets lost in the avalanche of SMiLE reconstructions because it seems to take away more than it gives. Looking at the track list, there's nothing new here, only a slight re-shuffle, and it commits the cardinal crime of using any available source, rather than attempting an "authentic" contemporary reconstruction, which fans want but will never get. If you have the attention span, please read on, because there's a bullet-proof logic behind the process that resulted in thirty minutes of crystal holy bliss.

One of the many reasons for SMiLE's non-completion is not lack of content; it's the opposite. Brian was coming up with just too much material, finding it impossible to stay focused. Every SMiLE reconstruction has had the same problem. Coming up with a CD length reconstruction, leave alone a forty minute album, has meant trying to find a home for innumerable snippets and unfinished fragments that detract and distract.

The ground rules for this version are:

- No cartoon whimsy. Brian at various times suggested it was going to be a comedy album, whatever that is, and this was one of the many distractions that became an unstoppable  shitstorm of ideas. So no I'm In Great Shape and Vegetables or George Fell Into His French Horn skits. This is SMiLE as a work of art.

- No fragments of cover versions. No Gee, I Wanna Be Around, You Are My Sunshine, The Old Master Painter ... Ask not why I cut them out, ask why they were ever included in the first place.

- No "elements suite". Another unfinished concept he was trying to shoe-horn in (or not, depending on who you read). It's an unnecessary complication. 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 already snipped a lot of tape, but we're still left with enough songs in a state of completion to constitute an album (the Beach Boys had form for half-hour albums).

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 chose, and it makes no claim to be definitive. It is more coherent than other mixes, a suite flowing through developing movements.

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 Brian Wilson Presents is baffling - the extraordinary melody is right there. The lyric was written. 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.

Material is taken from the Beach Boys official catalog (any period), a little Dae Lims and SonicLovesNoise. My many edits and segués are exclusive to this version. Listen for in the late afternoon and tell me it's not the sweetest version of Wind Chimes you ever heard. Listen for the crows and the piano thump in the wide-screen Cabinessence. Listen, listen, listen ...

The SMiLE you send out returns to you.