Talk:Collapse of Smile

Some clarifying statements

This thread has a lot of contemporary quotes from magazines talking about the collapse. I would go through the entirety if it wasn't so exhausting to do so.

HIT WEEK-May 18 1967 (Dutch magazine). The band were interviewed in Holland on May 14 and asked why they'd released the two year old single "Then I Kissed Her." Mike answered: "Of course we'd prefer to release something new and we thought that Smile would be released directly after our British tour but Brian is a perfectionist, that's why it takes so long." Dennis: "Everything was already finished, also the Heroes and Villains single, but my brother Brian is very serious, I find that a good thing." Bruce (Discussing the rumor that Brian had decided to scrap Heroes and release Vegetables as a single instead: "Heroes evolved and really became too long for a single. Vegetables also might be a bit more commercial."

D & ME May 20 1967 reported: "Contrary to some reports, plans for the 'Heroes and Villains' the group's scheduled new single, have not been completely scrapped. Roger Easterby of the Howes office, who was with the boys throughout their British tour, said: 'When the boys return to the States they will spend a complete month in the studios completing 'Heroes and Villains' and also working on a new LP."

LA TIMES syndicated story that appeared in July 1967 commented: "Rumor had it that, apart from the legal hassles with Capitol. he (Brian) was not happy with the tapes, which had already been through months of mixing, balancing, splicing and mastering and might never let them be issued as records....On July 5 Brian Wilson finished the tape and invited Capitol's director of artists and repertoire Karl Engemann to the house to hear it. 'I arrived' Engemann said 'and no one was there. Brian had gotten so excited with the finished tape that he'd taken it to radio station KHJ so he could hear it on the radio.'...The album too will be forthcoming, retitled Smiley Smile-the redundant adjective tacked on apparently as grinning finish to a long quiet hassle." (this article makes clear-that the situation was being spun as BBs finally finished Smile to their satisfaction-rather than BBs scrapped it and did something new)

In August 12 1967 Melody Maker Bruce refers to the gap between Good Vibrations and Heroes "came about because we were on a European tour; because we were involved in a lawsuit with our recording company in the States; and because Brian decided to record Heroes and Villains again when we got back from the tour. He scrapped a finished version of the song and wrote it again. This version is completely different from the number he wrote first."

Sept 1967 Carl Wilson interview with Pete Johnson of the LA Times: "Those six months were a difficult time for us. Brian just wasn't happy with Heroes and Villains until he had worked it over and over, throwing out parts and adding new ones. So we had no new records and we were in a lawsuit with Capitol and then my draft problem developed....

Carl commented that the new album is not the same one that Brian was working on at the time Good Vibrations was released "He still has all those tapes but we decided not to have a complicated album this time. We did Smiley Smile quickly in a couple of weeks to get something out. It's not nearly as ambitious an album as Pet Sounds was.

Carl interviewed in Fairfield, CT in Nov 1967 "In the case of Heroes and Villains we didn't feel that it would have the mass appeal so we canned it for awhile and decided to release it. Originally we didn't release it because we didn't think that it would be the kind of song that people would hear on the radio and immediately pick up."

Mike in Beat Instrumental February 1968 (Interview done in BBs brief visit to London in Dec 1967)- Regarding Wild Honey "Sure people were baffled and mystified by Smiley Smile but it was a matter of progression. We had this feeling that we were going too far, losing touch I guess, and this new one brings us back more into reality....Brian has been re-thinking our recording program and in any case we all have a much greater say nowadays in what we turn out in the studio."

More excerpts are scattered throughout the pages.--Ilovetopaint (talk) 20:04, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for this, have been dipping into since you posted. The article is coming along very nicely bty, and of course the story is utterly fascinating on several levels. Ceoil (talk) 22:27, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

More about the Taylor cancellation:

Derek Taylor, D&ME, Apr. 22, 1967. This article would be for the week of April 11 to 18:

“Well, where were we vis-à-vis the Beach Boys? What I am really doing is stalling because I can not find a facile way to tell you that the most famous single not to have been recorded is not yet recorded.

In other words, and to make the longest record ever made very short a tale, ‘Heroes and Villains’ is not going to be a single. It is however going to make history as one of the ones that got away. The talk now is that it will be an album track on ‘Smile’, the also famous album also not yet complete.

Please understand the Beach Boys delays with product are the result of painful self-criticism. The mirrors into which Brian Wilson looks for reassurance are not always kind. Sometimes there is no reflection at all. His view is that ‘Heroes and Villains’, at present, is tormented with over-elaboration and a score of second thoughts, cruelly chipped from his bump of caution. It was ever thus with great men.

Title of the new single ‘Vege-tables’ (the spelling may be wrong) a light and lyrical day-to-day green-grocer song on which AL JARDINE sings a most vigorous lead.”

Derek Taylor, D&ME, 4/29/67, covering the week of April 18 to 25:

“The Beach Boys? There too is a piquant appetiser for the millions of people who are now rock ‘n roll experts.

They are the longest-lived major pop group in America - they began in 1961 and they are, well you know how big they are. Yet by the erratic pattern of their single releases and the dramatic changes in their albums, they are a constant stimulant to conversation. Where are they at? Who is Brian Wilson? What is going on with ‘Heroes and Villains’? What is ‘Vegetables’ the next single? When is the album ready?”

Derek Taylor, D&ME, May 6 1967, week of April 25 to May 2, the Boys arrived in Dublin May 1:

“BUT ALAS… Brian Wilson began to stare at the glittering ships of tape and as the day of the launch became nearer than a date on the never-never calendar, he gazed at his plans and he turned his mind’s ear inwards and the longer he stared and the more he heard, the clearer it became that he was now in his jet age, building steamships. Which couldn’t be right.

In truth, every beautifully designed, finely-wrought inspirationally-welded piece of music made these last months by Brian and his Beach Boy craftsmen has been SCRAPPED.

Not destroyed, but scrapped. For what Wilson seals in a can and destroys is scrapped.

As an average fan of the Beach Boys, I think it is bitterly disappointing. But it isn’t as if one is bereft of the group’s essential spirit – there are 14 albums, many of them incredibly pure and full of life and lovely.

One is, however, deprived of renewal. It is like wait for an heir when the pregnancy is total. It has to come. Has to.

What, then? I don’t know. The Beach Boys don’t know. Brian Wilson, God grant him peace of mind…he doesn’t know.

He is waiting with his nearest Mike and Al and Bruce and his dearest Carl and Dennis. And if it is difficult for them, it is absolutely unbearable for Brian.

It has to come. New single, new album.”

--Ilovetopaint (talk) 17:44, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

And an unsourced quote from Carl Wilson, which I assume was reprinted in the liner notes of Sunshine Tomorrow(?)

We all really dug Motown, right?...So Brian reckoned we should get more into a white R&B bag. I also recall around that time the band, and Brian in particular, getting criticized very heavily for sounding like choirboys.

--Ilovetopaint (talk) 18:04, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

The (admittedly vague) claim by Van Dyke Parks that two Beatles contrived to hear Smile tapes at Armin Steiner's studio falls apart at the most cursory glance of the timelines involved. In short, no-one was in the right place at the right time to do any such thing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.15.124.237 (talk) 07:32, 14 October 2020 (UTC)