Smiley Smile is the 12th studio album by American rock band the Beach Boys, released on September 18, 1967. The album reached number 9 on UK record charts, but sold poorly in the US, peaking at number 41--the band's lowest chart placement to that point. Critics and fans generally received the album with confusion and disappointment. Only one single was issued from Smiley Smile: "Heroes and Villains". "Good Vibrations" and "Gettin' Hungry" were also released, but the former was issued a year earlier, while the latter was not credited to the band.
Devised as a simplified version of their then-forthcoming Smile--a different, much more elaborately constructed LP--Smiley Smile contrasts significantly with its minimalist approach and lo-fi production. Following principal songwriter Brian Wilson's declaration that most of the original Smile tapes were off-limits, the majority of recording sessions lasted for only six weeks at his makeshift home studio using what was predominantly radio broadcasting equipment, a detuned piano, electronic bass, and a Baldwin theater organ favored by Brian. The unconventional recording process juxtaposed an experimental party-like atmosphere with short pieces of music edited together in a disjointed manner, combining the engineering methods of "Good Vibrations" with the loose feeling of their 1965 album Beach Boys' Party!. Carl Wilson famously compared the end result to "a bunt instead of a grand slam."
From 1966 to 1967, Smile was repeatedly delayed as the Beach Boys were subject to a considerable level of media hype amid a publicity campaign that proclaimed "Brian Wilson is a genius". When the group dropped out of headlining the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, they began to be derided by a contingent of the rock press as the archetypal "pop music cop-outs". After settling payment disputes with Capitol Records, Smiley Smile was distributed in collaboration with Brother Records, a new record label and holding company founded by the band. Its production was unusually credited to "the Beach Boys" rather than Brian alone, marking the point where he began relinquishing his hold as the group's creative leader. Smile was ultimately left unfinished as the group embarked on a brief tour of Hawaii, and then, the recording of their next album, Wild Honey, released only three months later.
Smiley Smile opened a seven-year string of under-performing Beach Boys albums, but has since grown in stature to become a cult and critical favorite in the Beach Boys' oeuvre. At one point, it was used by some rehab centers to help relieve the aftereffects of intense psychedelic experiences. Regarded as a forerunner to certain bedroom pop acts, in 1974, it was voted the 64th greatest album of all time by NME writers and, in 2000, it was one of 100 albums featured in the book The Ambient Century as a landmark in the development of ambient music. Some session highlights from the album are featured on the compilations The Smile Sessions (2011) and 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow (2017).
Video Smiley Smile
Background
The Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds, issued on May 16, 1966, was massively influential upon its release, containing lush and sophisticated orchestral arrangements that raised the band's prestige to the top level of rock innovators. Early reviews for the album in the US ranged from negative to tentatively positive, but the reception from music journalists in the UK was very favorable. The group had recently employed the Beatles' former press officer Derek Taylor as their publicist. Bothered by the popular view of the Beach Boys as outdated surfers, leader and songwriter Brian Wilson requested that Taylor establish a new image for the band as fashionable counterculture icons, and so a promotional campaign with the tagline "Brian Wilson is a genius" was created and coordinated by Taylor. In October 1966, the group followed up Pet Sounds with "Good Vibrations", a laboriously produced single that achieved major international success. By then, an album titled Smile had been conceived as an extension of that song's recording approach, with Wilson composing music in collaboration with lyricist Van Dyke Parks. Wilson envisioned Smile as an outlet for all of his intellectual occupations, such as his fascination with spirituality and its relationship to humor and laughter. He told Melody Maker: "Our new album will be better than Pet Sounds. It will be as much an improvement over Sounds as that was over [our 1965 album] Summer Days."
After months of recording and media hype, the original Smile project was shelved due to corporate pressures, technical problems, internal power struggles, and legal stalling. Business partner David Anderle attempted to form Brother Records, an independent label, with the intention of giving "entirely new concepts to the recording industry, and to give the Beach Boys total creative and promotional control over their product." A March 1967 lawsuit seeking $255,000 (equivalent to $1.83 million in 2016) was launched against Capitol Records over neglected royalty payments. Within the lawsuit, there was also an attempt to terminate the band's contract with Capitol before its November 1969 expiry. Band quarrels led Parks to leave the project in April 1967, with Anderle following suit weeks later. Dennis Wilson explained that the group had become "very paranoid about the possibility of losing our public. ... Drugs played a great role in our evolution but as a result we were frightened that people would no longer understand us, musically." Brian said that Smile leftovers like "Surf's Up" were left unreleased because he lacked a "commercial feeling" for those songs, surmising that "Maybe some people like to hang on to certain songs as their own little songs that they've written, almost for themselves. You know, what they've written is nice for them ... but a lot of people just don't like it." Carl Wilson reflected on the period: "To get that album [Smile] out, someone would have needed willingness and perseverance to corral all of us. Everybody was so loaded on pot and hash all of the time that it's no wonder the project didn't get done."
In early May 1967, Taylor announced that Smile had been scrapped, but the Beach Boys were still under pressure and a contractual obligation to record and present an album to Capitol. On June 2, Brian declared to his bandmates that most of the material recorded for Smile was now off-limits. According to Carl, "Brian just said, 'I can't do this. We're going to make a homespun version of it instead. We're just going to take it easy. I'll get in the pool and sing. Or let's go in the gym and do our parts.' That was Smiley Smile." In interviews conducted over the next year, Brian intimated that he had run out of ideas "in a conventional sense", and that he was "about ready to die". He says: "I decided not to try any more, and not try and do such great things ... And we had so much fun. The Smiley Smile era was so great, it was unbelievable. Personally, spiritually, everything, it was great. I didn't have any paranoia feelings." Carl described the end product as "a bunt instead of a grand slam".
Maps Smiley Smile
Style and content
In his book about psychedelic music, author Jim DeRogatis referred to Smiley Smile as a work of the "ultimate psychedelic rock library". Conversely, Stylus Magazine's Edwin Faust wrote in 2003 that the album "embraces the listener with a drugged out sincerity; a feat never accomplished by the more pretentious and heavy-handed psychedelia of that era. It is for this reason Smiley Smile flows so well with the more experimental pop of today". According to music theorist Daniel Harrison, Smiley Smile is not a work of rock music as the term was understood in 1967, and that portions of the album "can be thought of as a kind of protomiminal rock music". He continues:
"Smiley Smile can almost be considered a work of art music in the Western classical tradition, and its innovations in the musical language of rock can be compared to those that introduced atonal and other nontraditional techniques into that classical tradition. The spirit of experimentation is just as palpable in Smiley Smile as it is in, say, Schoenberg's op. 11 piano pieces. Yet there is also a spirit of tentativeness in Smiley Smile. We must remember that it was essentially a Plan B--that is, the album issued instead of Smile. ... Whereas a Schoenberg could have notated his compositions cheaply on paper and waited for sympathetic performers to play them, Brian Wilson composed in a recording studio that charged by the hour, employed professional musicians, and required the services of a record company to mass produce and distribute his work. Commercial failure simply cannot be tolerated in this regime, and a work like Smiley Smile has no place in it."
Most of the album was recorded at Brian's home studio in Bel Air from June 3 to July 14, 1967. Since the recording of "Good Vibrations" in 1966, Wilson had established a new method of operation. Instead of working on whole songs with clear large-scale syntactical structures, Wilson limited himself to recording short interchangeable fragments (or "modules"). Through the method of tape splicing, each fragment could then be assembled into a linear sequence, allowing any number of larger structures and divergent moods to be produced at a later time. Smiley Smile continued this approach. It was the first album for which production was credited to the entire group, instead of Brian alone. Dennis explained: "He wanted it that way. He said 'It's produced by the Beach Boys.'" When asked if Brian was "still the producer of Smiley Smile," Carl answered, "Most definitely." Brian acknowledged: "We had done about six months work on another thing, but we jumped and ended up doing the entire thing here at the house with an entirely different mood and approach than what we originally started out with." When questioned on why the band took the approach they did, he stated, "We just had a particular atmosphere that we were working in that inspired the particular kind of things that were on the album." Author Domenic Priore notes that when the Beach Boys were taken out of professional studios, "the discipline of the clock, rates and overtime disappeared".
The core of the album's instrumentation consists of organ, honky-tonk piano, and electronic bass played by the Beach Boys themselves, rather than the session musicians employed in much of their previous work. Brian became obsessed with a three-tiered Baldwin organ during the album's recording, resulting in a more minimalist approach to the new arrangements in addition to the album's central timbre. Tape manipulation was another prominent feature, varispeed being applied to a few miscellaneous vocals. On "She's Goin' Bald", a new device called the Eltro Information Rate Changer was used to raise the pitch of the group's vocals without affecting the tempo. The album continued Brian's exploration of "party tracks"--a form of music which includes the sounds of people shouting and making noises, as if at a party. Mike Love, recalling how "She's Goin' Bald" was a song about fellatio, commented: "We were stoned out of our heads. We were laughing our asses off when we recorded that stuff." Brian had previously enacted this approach with Beach Boys' Party! in 1965, thereby mixing that record's style with the modular composition method he devised for "Good Vibrations".
The Beach Boys recorded using what was predominantly radio broadcasting equipment, which lacked many of the technical elements and effects found in an established studio. This led to unconventional ways of achieving particular sounds at the home, such as a replacement for what would be achieved by an echo chamber. The album's engineer Jim Lockert recalled how "Brian's swimming pool had a leak in it and was empty, so we put a microphone in the bottom of this damn near Olympic-size pool and the guys laid down inside the pool and sang so the sound would go down the wall of the concrete pool into the microphone - and that was part of the vocals on one of those songs." Some recording accidents were used to their advantage, such as in "With Me Tonight", which contains an informal link between the verse and chorus by way of a voice saying "good", as in "good take", spoken by the band's road manager Arnie Geller from the control room. Lockert has spoken about other peculiarities of the sessions, including vocals being tracked in the shower. Due to this eclectic mix of recording paraphernalia and idiosyncratic methods of tracking the sounds, Smiley Smile possesses an unusual sound.
Differences from Smile
From the vast sum of material Brian had recorded for Smile, only portions of the backing track for "Heroes and Villains" (recorded October 1966) and the coda for "Vegetables" (recorded April 1967) were used for Smiley Smile. "Heroes and Villains" was modified substantially during the Smiley Smile sessions before being issued as a single preceding the album's release. Comparing Brian's original Smile mixes with the single version, Al Jardine called it "a pale facsimile ... Brian re-invented the song for this record ... He purposefully under-produced the song." "Good Vibrations", which was recorded sporadically from February to September 1966, appears with no differences from the original single. Brian reportedly objected to "Heroes and Villains"'s placement on Smiley Smile, but for the first time, he was outvoted by his bandmates, who insisted on its inclusion.
In contrast, "Wind Chimes", "Wonderful", and most parts of "Vegetables" were completely rerecorded with dramatically scaled-down arrangements. Jardine felt that "there are some pretty cool songs on that album but I didn't like rehashing some of the Smile songs. That didn't work for me." "Vegetables" was reworked as a kind of campfire song, "Wonderful" traded its harpsichord, strings, and horns with a haphazardly-played organ, high-pitched backing vocals, and a doo-wop sing-along section, and the marimbas in "Wind Chimes" were replaced by organ and dissonant noise. The only songs not explicitly taken from Smile are "Little Pad" and "Gettin' Hungry". Other tracks took elements of Smile era compositions to make something slightly different; "She's Goin' Bald" borrows the verse melody from a Smile fragment known as "He Gives Speeches", "With Me Tonight" is a variation on "Vegetables", and "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (W. Woodpecker Symphony)" lifts a recurring melodic hook from "The Elements: Fire". While the Beatles' Paul McCartney was present at an April 1967 session for "Vegetables", the recording where he allegedly provides celery biting sounds was not used on Smiley Smile.
Release
Before the album's commercial release, the Beach Boys were involved in the conception of the Monterey Pop Festival, which was held in June 1967. At the last minute, the band declined to appear at the event. Biographer David Leaf explained: "Monterey was a gathering place for the 'far out' sounds of the 'new' rock, and the Beach Boys in concert really had no exotic sounds (excepting "Good Vibrations") to display. The net result of all this internal and external turmoil was that the Beach Boys didn't go to Monterey, and it is thought that this non-appearance was what really turned the 'underground' tide against them." Publicly, the band said that they couldn't play for reasons pertaining to Carl's military draft, but many of the people involved with the festival thought that the group was simply too scared to compete with the "new music". As author Steven Gaines writes, the decision "had a snowballing effect" that represented "a damning admission that [the Beach Boys] were washed up".
Rock critic Paul Williams saw that Anderle's idea to form Brother Records was reasonable, "but the time it takes to put this type of thing through the courts was not conducive to the production race that was important during this period of radical change in pop." In the months leading up to Smiley Smile's release, a multitude of revolutionary rock albums were received by an anxious and maturing youth market as Wilson's image was reduced to that of an "eccentric" figure. From February to May 1967, this included Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced, the Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico, and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Up until this point, the Beatles were the only act that posed a competitive threat to the Beach Boys, and Wilson was concerned that if Smile followed in the wake of another critically successful release by the Beatles, that his album would be received with unjust comparisons. Once they released Sgt. Pepper, Wilson's race was effectively lost.
The Capitol lawsuit was eventually settled out of court, the band receiving their $200,000 in exchange for Brother Records to distribute through Capitol Records, along with a guarantee that the band produce at least one million dollars profit. Two singles were then issued on the Brother imprint: "Heroes and Villains" and "Gettin' Hungry". The former peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. The latter was not credited to the Beach Boys, but instead to Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Capitol A&R director Karl Engemann began circulating a memo, dated July 25, 1967, in which Smiley Smile was referred to as a "cartoon" stopgap for Smile. The memo also discussed conversations between him and Wilson pertaining to the release of a 10-track Smile album, which would not have included the songs "Heroes and Villains" or "Vegetables". This never came to fruition and, instead, the group embarked on a tour of Hawaii in August. Bruce Johnston, who was absent for most of the recording sessions, did not accompany the group, although Brian did. Their performances were limited to two shows at an auditorium in Honolulu, which were filmed and recorded with the intention of releasing a live album, Lei'd in Hawaii. On stage, the band continued to exhibit a more minimal sound.
Initial reception
Smiley Smile was released in the US on September 18, 1967, and peaked at number 41 on the Billboard charts, making it their worst-selling album to that date. It spent most of its 21-week chart time bubbling under 100 and 197. When released in the UK in November, it performed better, reaching number 9 of the UK Albums Chart. Critics and fans were generally underwhelmed by the album. Leaf wrote: "By the time Smiley Smile was released ... the Beach Boys had become cultural dinosaurs. And it happened almost overnight." According to writer Scott Schinder, the album was released to "general incomprehension. While Smile may have divided the Beach Boys' fans had it been released, Smiley Smile merely baffled them."
A review in Hit Parader praised the album for "probably [having] more a cappella harmony than on any album since the fall of the singing-group era in the late 1950s", but that they "still like Pet Sounds better." NME wrote of the album: "By the standards which this group has set itself, it's more than a grade disappointing." Hi Fidelity said: "... they are making the psychedelic route ... perhaps in the unforgettable city of Fresno. Until they reach the San Francisco Bay Bridge or return to the shores of Malibu ... their work can only receive partial approval." Rolling Stone referred to it as a "disaster" and an "abortive attempt to match the talents of Lennon and McCartney." On December 14, 1967, the magazine's editor and co-founder Jann Wenner printed an influential article that denounced Wilson's "genius" label, which he called a "promotional shuck", and the Beach Boys themselves, which he called "one prominent example of a group that has gotten hung up on trying to catch The Beatles." He wrote that "for some reason, [Smiley Smile] just doesn't make it ... [the songs] just don't move you. Other than displaying Brian Wilson's virtuosity for production, they are pointless."
The Milwaukee Sentinel called the LP "probably the most valuable contribution to rock since the Beatles Revolver", praising it for being completely dissimilar from anything the Beatles had done. The magazine Cheetah gave the album a rave review, observing that "the mood is rather childlike (not childish)--the kind of innocence that shows on the album cover, with its Rousseau-like animals and forest, and the smoke from the cabin chimney spelling out the title. ... The expression that emerges from this music is very strange: it's a very personal mood." Journalist Richard Goldstein remembers his review for The New York Times: "I was struck by its fragile melodies and their relationship to sacred music; those familiar ride-the-curl voices, now 'hushed with wonder,' reminded me of the Fauré Requiem, but they were utterly American."
Retrospective reviews
Priore reflected: "Actually, the [only] reason most people didn't care for Smiley Smile is that it came out in place of Smile." Richie Unterberger concurred, rating the album four out of five stars, and suggesting that media-hype of the collapsed Smile project was to blame for Smiley Smile's lackluster reception in the United States. He called it a "rather nifty, if rather slight, effort that's plenty weird". In a 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau and David Fricke named it one of the 40 essential albums of 1967; Christgau declared: "Towering it's not; some kind of hit it is." In 2001, Spencer Owen of Pitchfork awarded the album a 9.5/10 score, and wrote "Smiley Smile is a near-masterpiece. Without any awareness of Smile's existence, this album could have been a contemporary classic ... and although the album isn't anywhere close to the sonic revolution that Sgt. Pepper had already brought, Wilson's innovative production and arrangements still bring out the best in every single track."
Journalist Nick Kent maintained that the album "undersold the worth" of Smile with "dumb pot-head skits, so-called healing chants and even some weird 'loony tunes' items straight out of a cut-rate Walt Disney soundtrack". The Guardian's Geoffrey Cannon viewed Parks' lyrics as "pretentious", believing that Parks "messed Brian up" during Smiley Smile. Paste's Bryan Rolli ranked it at number 2 in a list of the "10 Most Disappointing Follow-Up Albums", calling it a "disjointed collection of minimalist recordings and a capella bits that are not so much songs as fragments of a shattered psyche". In the 2004 edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide, the reviewer described Smiley Smile as "inconsistent" and said that, given the context of its release in September 1967, "the album was like a strange throwback - it highlighted how out of touch these suburban California surfers had become with the psychedelic times."
Legacy
Smiley Smile became the first in a three-part series of lo-fi Beach Boys albums (preceding Wild Honey and Friends) and the first in a seven-year string of under-performing Beach Boys albums (ending with the 1974 compilation Endless Summer). The Smile era is generally viewed as the beginning of the artistic decline of the Beach Boys and the point in which Brian began relinquishing his hold as the group's creative leader. Carl took Brian's place as the most musically dominant member, and Brian would not be credited as producer for another Beach Boys album until 1976's 15 Big Ones. Much of the group's recordings from 1967 to 1970 continued the pattern of sparse instrumentation, a more relaxed ensemble, and a seeming inattention to production quality. Harrison opined that this experimental songwriting and production phase lasted until Sunflower (1970), after which their albums "contain a mixture of middle-of-the-road music entirely consonant with pop style during the early 1970s with a few oddities that proved that the desire to push beyond conventional boundaries was not dead." "Cool, Cool Water", an outtake from Smiley Smile and Wild Honey sessions, was partially rerecorded and issued as the closing track for Sunflower.
The album has since grown in stature to become a cult and critical favorite in the band's oeuvre. In the early 1970s, some rehab centers played the LP as a healing tool for patients, where it was deemed helpful for easing off drugs. After a 1974 reissue, the negative response to the album mellowed, the same year that NME writers voted it as the 64th greatest album of all time. According to Matjas-Mecca, following the mid 1970s, the album "began to acquire a fan base that heard magic in Brian's lo-fi production ... In the 2000s, it began to appear on various lists of must-hear albums, and is now considered an important work in Brian's catalog. In a world that embraces lo-fi art, the album is considered a masterpiece." It later inspired the tribute albums Smiling Pets (1998) and Portland Sings The Beach Boys "Smiley Smile" (2013). In 2000, it was one of 100 albums featured in the book The Ambient Century as a landmark in the development of ambient music. In 2017, Pitchfork ranked it the 118th greatest album of the 1960s, with Mark Richardson writing: "it basically invented the kind of lo-fi bedroom pop that would later propel Sebadoh, Animal Collective, and other characters."
When The Smile Sessions box set was released in 2011, co-producer Mark Linett acknowledged that "there's things that some people think - should Smiley Smile sessions be there - [with tracks such as] 'Can't Wait Too Long', we get into a very fuzzy area." In 2017, additional session highlights from the album were released on the rarities compilation 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow.
Track listing
Lead vocals per 1990 CD liner notes by David Leaf. On its original release, Van Dyke Parks was not credited for "Wonderful".
Reissues
Personnel
Per David Leaf:
The Beach Boys
- Al Jardine
- Mike Love
- Brian Wilson
- Carl Wilson
- Dennis Wilson
- Production staff
- The Beach Boys - producers
- Chuck Britz - engineer
- Jim Lockert - engineer
Notes
References
Bibliography
External links
- Smiley Smile at MusicBrainz
- "Epiphany at Zuma Beach or Brian Wilson Hallucinates Me" (2002) - David Dalton's retrospective account of a meeting with Brian Wilson in July 1967
- "'Smile' - My First 25 Years : a summary so far" (2011-13) - series of blog posts ruminating on Smile and various tangential aspects of 1960s pop and the band's history
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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