SMiLE - The Beach Boys/Brian Wilson

[Pecker]

It's been a chuff of a long journey, and no mistake.

Around 41 years ago Brian Wilson aborted the SMiLE album, his masterpiece designed to surpass the superb Pet Sounds.

Record company shenanigans, in-fighting, drugs and mental illness intervened, and the project was shelved. Over the coming years several tracks appeared on later Beach Boys albums, and bootlegs galore appeared revealing various snippets of the original recordings.

I became acquainted with SMiLE myself through a bootleg from Camden Market in around 1990. I think I played it as much as anything else for the next 4 years at Uni, but was naturally dissatisfied with its unfinished nature as much as I was in awe of its genius.

FFWD to 2004 and Brian Wilson re-recorded the album from scratch, with original lyricist Van Dyke Parks adding the missing lyrics, and the world finally got to hear SMiLE. Great...but a little disappointing. Time had not been kind to Brian's voice, and his tones sounded awfully 'old' alongside the originals.

I'd long toyed with the idea of re-creating the new BW version using the original elements, only to find someone else had already done it. A bootlegging group called Purple Chick have doctored the original tapes into BW's new running order and arrangement. I managed to obtain a copy - superb!

But I was still a little dissatisfied – there’s no pleasing some.

You see it wasn’t possible for The Beach Boys to record vocals in 1967 that weren’t completed until 2004, so a number of the Purple Chick tracks were instrumentals, or with vocals so low in the mix that they were almost inaudible.

Fortunately, Purple Chick did such a good job that the tracks between the two versions were edited and faded at identical places, so it proves very easy to mix and match tracks between the two versions.

Still not happy, Pecker? Well no. Missing from BW’s version (and subsequently the PC version) were With Me Tonight, Cool, Cool Water and the extended segments of Heroes and Villains, as well as the end to the 'alternate version' of that song. So I’ve made my own Disc 2 - 'The Extras', and I now finally have, after all these years, as complete a version of SMiLE as I'm ever going to have.

Finally.

SMiLE.

FINISHED!

Pecker’s Ultimate SMiLE consists of:

CD1 – The Album

1: Our Prayer/Gee (Purple Chick version)
2: Heroes And Villains (Purple Chick version)
3: Roll Plymouth Rock (Brian Wilson version)
4: Barnyard (Brian Wilson version)
5: Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine (Purple Chick version)
6: Cabin Essence (Purple Chick version)
7: Wonderful (Purple Chick version)
8: Song For Children (Brian Wilson version)
9: Child Is Father Of The Man (Brian Wilson version)
10: Surf's Up (Purple Chick version)
11: I'm In Great Shape/I Wanna Be Around/Workshop (Brian Wilson version)
12: Vega-Tables (Purple Chick version)
13: On A Holiday (Brian Wilson version)
14: Wind Chimes (Purple Chick version)
15: Mrs. O'Leary's Cow (Brian Wilson version)
16: In Blue Hawaii (Brian Wilson version)
17: Good Vibrations (original 45 version)

CD2 – The Extras

1: Heroes and Villains [Alternate Version]
2: Heroes and Villains [Sections]
3: With Me Tonight
4: Cool, Cool Water
5: Been Way Too Long
6: George Fell Into His French Horn
7: Surf's Up (Longer Version - With Intro)

There it is. Still necessarily rough around the edges, but as close to perfection as we’re ever going to hear, and now a true and worthy contender for the greatest album of all time.

Just forty one years in the making.

Steve W

[unique]

i compiled my own version years before the rerecorded one as an 80 minute single disc with artwork and it's still the most listenable version i've heard. personally i wouldn't mix tracks from different era's like that, with a 30 odd year gap in the middle. the PC version is a good job, but some of the fan recreations tend to lean more towards completeness than pure listenability. it was afterall originally going to be a single lp of about 45 minutes

[Pecker]

Originally Posted by unique

i compiled my own version years before the rerecorded one as an 80 minute single disc with artwork and it's still the most listenable version i've heard. personally i wouldn't mix tracks from different era's like that, with a 30 odd year gap in the middle. the PC version is a good job, but some of the fan recreations tend to lean more towards completeness than pure listenability. it was afterall originally going to be a single lp of about 45 minutes

I feared that, but the transitions are seamless. I have no jarring feeling at all.

For me the biggest problem with the new BW version is how weak his voice is. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but we have the originals. You can't help listen to Brian's vocals on the 2 versions of Surf's Up, for example, and cringe.

So the only BW versions I've used are the ones where the original vocal either doesn't exist, or is effectively unusable.

The only things that matter to me are (a) it works, and (b) we still have all the other boots.

I think all SMiLE fans have had years of hoping for a 'finished' version. Whatever we do with the original boots, they're always goinmg to be unfinished. Whatever we do with the new version, the vocals are weak. This, for me, is not perfect, but it's the best compromise.

Unique, if you have both the PC & BW version, try my version and see what you think.

Best wishes, and thanks for the response.



Steve W

ps Biggest problem - not being able to fit in With Me Tonight and Cool, Cool Water into the running order.

SW

[unique]

that's the problem with BW these days, his voice is shot. his backing band is great live and perfectly mimic the records, but it's like a beach boys tribute band with a poor frontman

one bonus of computer playback these days is you no longer have to stick to the limitations of cd lengths, so you can just queue up 90+ minutes in winamp and play in order that way, and it's easy to move the order of songs about to see how it feels. i sequenced my smile in the order i felt sounded best, rather than sticking to historic reasons, thus it became something genuinely worth listening to, whereas the first boots i got on cd sounded a effort to listen to