Side 1
1. Heroes And Villains 3:37
2. Vegetables 2:07
3. Fall Breaks And Back To Winter (W. Woodpecker Symphony) 2:15
4. She’s Goin’ Bald 2:15
5. Little Pad 2:30

Side 2
1. Good Vibrations 3:36
2. With Me Tonight 2:17
3. Wind Chimes 2:36
4. Gettin’ Hungry 2:27
5. Wonderful 2:21
6. Whistle In 1:04

In Mark Twain’s classic novel ‘The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer’ there is mention of a school swot who ‘once recited three thousand [bible] verses without stopping; but the strain upon his mental faculties was too great, and he was little better than an idiot from that day forth’. It is easy to imagine a similar thing having happened to Brian Wilson in 1967, at least as an excuse for the curiously imbecilic music that makes up much of the album under consideration here. Having already taken popular music to new levels of sophistication and emotional depth with ‘Pet Sounds’ he famously set to work on the legendary ‘Smile’ album, only to find the challenge he had set himself too great for his increasingly fragile mental state at the time. Despite the fact that ‘Smile’ was 90% finished, the project was abandoned, and he retreated with the rest of the Beach Boys to his home studio to hastily record a replacement. The altered title ‘Smiley Smile’ perfectly reflects the stoned carelessness with which the new material was produced, and the result was understandably met with bewilderment and hostility on its release. I wasn’t yet born in 1967, but I imagine the feeling of disappointment must have been similar to mine when I picked up a slightly worse for wear mono pressing in the bargain basement of the Notting Hill music & video exchange in the 1980s. Already a huge fan of ‘Pet Sounds’, I assumed that a follow up which started each side with ‘Heroes & Villains’ and ‘Good Vibrations’ just had to be another masterpiece. But I can still remember how my heart sank as the first few bars of track 2, ‘Vegetables’, bounced stupidly from the battered grooves. And this sinking feeling only increased as one inane track followed another. I’m not sure I was yet aware of the grand project this strange runt of an album had replaced, and therefore my confusion can’t have been as great as that of the 1967 Beach Boys fan who had heard the rumours of the masterpiece in the works. But I couldn’t help wondering why a major band would put out music as half-formed and generally idiotic as this, and why a major record label would agree to release it (perhaps the fact that it was the first release on the band’s own subsidiary label Brother Records meant that Capitol felt they could wash their hands of it). The biggest surprise, however, was how quickly I learned to love it. After a few listens the silly moments became rather endearing, and several of the tracks revealed amazing qualities, ranging from the friendly to the downright sinister. And while the music may have been recorded in a stoned haze (the occasional giggling is testament to this), the final mixdown seems to have been performed in a moment of clarity, ruthless editing providing abrupt jolts that frequently shake the music out of its stupor. The result is something like a cross between one of Paul McCartney’s home-made early solo albums and an ESP-Disk.

And so the album begins with ‘Heroes & Villains’, the band’s most recent single and the sole refugee from the ‘Smile’ sessions, it is a production tour-de-force quite at odds with the material knocked-off specifically for ‘Smiley Smile’ but somehow fits in because of its oddly muffled sound quality. Al Jardine has described it as lacking ‘sonic energy’, claiming that Brian ‘purposefully under-produced the song’ when it came to finishing it off for inclusion on this album (a crystal-clear stereo mix was belatedly made for the 2001 compilation ‘Hawthorne, CA’).* With the long, descending opening vocal kicking in half a beat before the backing track, it makes for an arresting if misleading opening track. A full discussion of its various movements really belongs to a review of ‘Smile’ itself, to which it provided a recurring musical theme. ‘Vegetables’ is the first of a handful of ‘Smile’ remakes, or more accurately ‘demakes’; a tighter, more minimal version of one of the lost album’s more throwaway moments, this song was intended to represent ‘earth’ in an ‘Elements Suite’, and bears out Brian Wilson’s claim that ‘Smile’ was partially intended as a comedy album. Lyrics such as ‘If you brought a big brown bag of them home/I’d jump up and down and hope you’d toss me a carrot’ couldn’t be further removed from ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’; and the ornate arrangements of ‘Pet Sounds’ are discarded in favour of little more than a thumping bass guitar and munched celery (although Brian’s fine attention to detail is evident in the little leap in the bassline behind the word ‘jump’). The outro is tacked on from the original ‘Smile’ version and features a possibly unique (and very successful) attempt to hum and laugh at the same time. In harmony, of course. The brilliantly titled instrumental ‘Fall Breaks And Back To Winter (W.Woodpecker Symphony)’ is really more of a tone poem than a symphony, resembling as it does a school music class attempting to illustrate the title using the most basic of instruments. Cyclical harmonies and deep organ bass go round and round while the earth itself croaks along in a friendly manner and a melodica plays the Woody Woodpecker tune. It’s a charming, organic piece of musical impressionism. God only knows what inspired the schadenfreude of ‘She’s Goin’ Bald’, but it is either the peak or the nadir of the album depending on your taste for goofy humour. Its very silliness masks the fact that there is actually some pretty good vocal harmonising going on at the start, but it soon goes into a particularly annoying middle section parodying the Silhouettes’ 50s hit ‘Get A Job’ but changing the lyrics to ‘What a blow’ (because of this Dennis was convinced that the song was about oral sex). The tape is gradually sped up until the group sound like psychotic chipmunks, before an abrupt cut to a spoof of theatrical melodrama in which each band member sings a dramatic line to rising piano chords. Best bit is the ‘You’re too late mama/Ain’t nothin’ upside your head’ outro with its super dry and upfront electric guitar part. ‘Little Pad’ kicks off with a deliberate false start**: someone shouts ‘Do it!’ before a couple of Beach Boys sing the opening line while trying not to laugh. The actual song alternately cuts between wistful verses that yearn for a pad in Hawaii and extracts from an unreleased, and quite delightful piece of music entitled ‘Hawaiian Song’ which originated from the same sessions. It makes a very pleasing close to side one.

Side two kicks off with the other recent single, and arguably the peak moment of the group’s career, ‘Good Vibrations’. Brian fought against the inclusion of this on the album and for the first time was overruled by his bandmates. This incredible production, which just a year earlier had placed The Beach Boys at the pinnacle of the pop scene, is totally at odds with the rest of an album which in one fell swoop brought them crashing down from their pedestal. Amazingly, the next song ‘With Me Tonight’ doesn’t suffer too much in comparison. Again it’s very slight, with nothing to it but organ chords and harmony vocals, but it shows how much The Beach Boys could do with so little, and Carl Wilson’s lead vocals are genuinely heartfelt. ‘Wind Chimes’ is another ‘Smile’ remake, this time the ‘air’ section of the ‘Elements Suite’, and another complete deconstruction, taking a tightly structured original and rendering it in a minimalist, freeform fashion that approaches avant garde with its deliberately chaotic vocal improvisations. A sudden edit of loud reverb and an incongruously deep and echoey rendering of the word ‘tinkle-ing’ add to the perversity of this musical vandalism. The pretty chorale coda is so quiet that on my original LP it was drowned out by the surface noise. The bizarre ‘Gettin’ Hungry’ seems like an unlikely choice for a single, but it really was released as a 45, credited to Brian Wilson & Mike Love (their rendition of The Everly Brothers’ ‘Devoted To You’ was exhumed from ‘The Beach Boys Party’ for the b‑side). Needless to say it wasn’t a hit, but it is notable for the proto-electronica of the intro, and the schizoid way it keeps abruptly cutting between Mike’s freeform verse and Brian’s clockwork chorus. Who else was doing stuff like this in 1967? Next up is my favourite track on the album. ‘Wonderful’ originated as a beautiful ‘Smile’ recording, with Brian singing its long twisted melody lines to a stately harpsichord accompaniment. For this version the Beach Boys return to the school music room, but the lights are off and there is an eerie gloom which is only exaggerated by the sound of children playing outside in the sunshine. Carl keeps his vocal down to an evil whisper and a melodica plays only the most discordant notes. This version adds a strange, almost nonsensical middle eight with stoned chatter and giggling disconcertingly prominent in the mix. It is a very spooky track, and in my opinion an unlikely highlight in The Beach Boys’ mighty catalogue. Perfectly sequenced towards the end of the album, its dark mood is only partially lifted by closing fragment ‘Whistle In’. A simple melody, first whistled and then sung a few times with the words ‘Remember the day day/Remember the night night/All day long’ before quickly fading out, it provides an inconclusive end to a deeply puzzling album. Dennis described it as ‘just something we were going through at that time connected with drugs, love, and everything’, but really it can by seen as the beginning of a cycle of remedial albums created by a group who suddenly found themselves forced to work as a team after their brilliant but fragile leader had burned himself out. And, according to Carl Wilson, it wasn’t just the band who were using their own creativity as therapy. In a 1970 interview he mentioned a drug clinic in Fort Worth, Texas ‘which takes people off the streets and helps them get over bad LSD trips. They don’t use any traditional medical treatment whatsoever. All they do is play the patient our ‘Smiley Smile’ album and apparently this acts as a soothing remedy which relaxes them and helps them to recover completely from their trip.’ The fact that ‘Smiley Smile’ was quickly followed by the more focused ‘Wild Honey’ (with the Brian Wilson/Mike Love writing partnership back in full flow) suggests that it had helped the Beach Boys make a full recovery too.

NOTES
* ‘Smiley Smiley’ is penultimate in a sequence of six Beach Boys albums, from ‘The Beach Boys Today’ in 1965 to ‘Wild Honey’ later in 1967, to not have been given a true stereo mix at the time. Several tracks from this period have recently been given the proper stereo treatment, including the whole ‘Pet Sounds’ album, allowing Brian Wilson’s big productions greater clarity and breathing space. For a long time I assumed that due to its minimalist nature ‘Smiley Smile’ could and should only exist in mono, but the ‘Harmony Friends’ bootleg features several alternate mixes in true stereo that shed interesting light on these very odd sessions.

** One of the interesting aspects of Beach Boys albums is that the group liked fans to hear what was going on in the studio, from mocked up audio verité tracks such as ‘Our Favourite Recording Sessions’ and ’ ”Cassius” Love vs. “Sonny” Wilson’ to bits of off-mic chatter audible during the instrumental breaks on ‘Wendy’ and ‘Here Today’. ‘Smiley Smile’ takes this to a whole new level; much of it seems to merely document the group goofing around when they should be recording more hits.