Behind The SMiLE:
Trivialities of a Teenage Symphony To God
The unreleased SMiLE album is very much the ultimate album that never was. I can’t for certain claim it was my first “album reconstruction”, but it certainly was one of the most important to me… and of course my favorite. I was a late bloomer for SMiLE, having discovered it probably in 2001. A band member brought in either Unsurpassed Masters Vol 16 or the Vigotone boot to rehearsal and played it for me as the rest of the band was arriving and setting up. While originally dismissive of The Beach Boys, I was quickly put in my place and set out to find the recordings for myself, ultimately performing a rite of passage that every SMiLE aficionado must do: roll their own SMiLE.
As I researched other fans’ takes on SMiLE, my mind, always rooted in intentionalism, kept rolling back to what I thought was the most important question: Yes, but what did Brian Wilson mean this to sound like? The answer, to me, was found in the Cantina mix of “Heroes and Villains”—this was the specific keystone track. Brian mixed it at the time. It was bonkers. It was beautiful. It was bombastic. I hadn’t heard anything like it before. This is what all of SMiLE should have sounded like if he had gotten his way! Not Smiley Smile, not even other SMiLE mixes I’d heard. How would I piece that together?
The journey, of course is the best part. My query lead to a rabbit hole of research and expanded into a universe of the elements, being in great shape and of course Heroes and Villains part II. While the music was always amazing, an interesting argument was always made for what was what and how. Next I found people seemed to care what my take on SMiLE was… Friends wanted a CD-R of my mix… A guy who called himself Mok wanted to trade mixes with me?? This was what SMiLE was really about: the first userinteractive album.
But then the unimaginable happened: we thought we would finally have the answers in 2004! Brian Wilson presented it, and it was fantastic. While I did not attend that tour, you better believe I traded for a bootleg of the very first performance, which arrived in my mailbox within a week. But after critically listening and even more research, I realized that if something is too good to be true, then it probably is… We learned that while SMiLE was surely completed today, it differed from the SMiLE of yesterday. And so we were left at where we began, allowed to continue the discourse. And that was absolutely fine with me.
This blog contains a brief summary of not only the recording information of the twelve main songs (thirteen if you count “Our Prayer”) but the many trivialities and debates that stem from them. I hope you find it as interesting as I do, and possibly even informative. Follow the links in the Table of Contents to view each song section. Sound sample YouTube links are sprinkled throughout for scholarly purpose only.
Originally published with soniclovenoize's SMiLE '67 reconstruction, December 2018
